


Waiting for Water

by Keyboardwielding_Squid



Category: Enderal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, His mind is not a pretty place, POV Second Person, Said POV being Tharaêl
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-03-08 17:34:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18899392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keyboardwielding_Squid/pseuds/Keyboardwielding_Squid
Summary: Maybe it's worth a try.Maybe it's even worth thousands.





	1. To Nowhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First fanfiction. Criticism is welcome, but try not to eat me alive! I'm here to play in the sandbox, not to become a writer. ;-)
> 
> Apologies for the somewhat reader-unfriendly PoV. It was chosen for a reason; hopefully I manage to pull it off. The first chapter is spent in a very bad mental space, by virtue of directly following the cliff, and refers to suicide rather bluntly.
> 
> The one and only relationship of the story will not involve Tharaêl, and will happen entirely offscreen.

You don't remember the first day.

There has to have been one, like every other time. You know that, intellectually. And yet like every other time, it simply isn't there. Only the sound of wind, the cold of ice and snow, then waking up under a tent with your head pounding like a drum.

It makes sense, you suppose. You had other things on your mind than the company or landscape. Two decades' worth of other things. And even without them, it is a fact of life that you are shit at beginnings. Endings, you can manage. Especially bad ones. But fresh starts and rebirths? New leaves turning over? Those happen to other people. The Undercity knows no spring, and neither do its denizens.

Maybe that's why the memories never manage to stay. Or maybe the ghost of your past steals them away from you, like the mercenary said it did back in the Refuge. You suppose that makes sense as well. If the soul is long dead and the vessel not even yours, why should the mind be otherwise?

The second day goes by as most days do, its memories clear enough — but that day does not feature much. Mainly dark skies, the discomfort of too-small clothes you cannot recall acquiring, and a slow trek down frozen slopes, trailing the mercenary's back. Precious little words, if any, after you think to ask why you are walking in the first place.

"Because if we were to find ourselves among the merry citizens of Ark _right now_ ," the mercenary answers you, "I trust neither of us to not tear out the throat of the first prissy Sublime who walks by."

You don't believe you could. You feel too numb for that. Too numb, and much, much too tired.

You close your eyes an instant and Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. Your eyes fly back open, and you shudder, shaking your head to help clear the image away.

You hadn't believed you could ever tear out Letho's throat either. And yet you did, didn't you? You did. No amount of clumsy attempts to put his corpse back together is ever going to change that. Nor will any amount of dwelling within the Upper City. What will you even do, once there? You have no Path. You know no trade. How long until you fall right back into stabbing and cutting throats?

Two moons?

Three?

Perhaps it _is_ better to walk. Perhaps the bears and wolves will solve the problem on the road. A painful solution, perhaps, but a fair one by all accounts. You feel more kin to them than to the city, anyway.

If all else fails, the fall remains, you tell yourself as a comfort. The slope is not quite as high up as the old temple was, but the cliffs remain steep, and the ground more than far enough. All you have to do is turn right, walk a little, and close your eyes — and then there will be no more questions, no more pain, no more remembering the absence behind Brother Sorrow's eyes.

But you said that you would try, and so try you do. The fall can wait. There will always be time later, unless you are dead already.

That second day is cold and unmemorable, but its evening stands out, with an improvised bonfire in the shelter of an old tomb. Your bread is long since hard, and even the mercenary’s Dal'Sark mead feels like liquid ice, but a pair of freshly-killed wolves promises good meat for the next few days. The mercenary skins and cuts with the ease born of long practice, while you prowl the area looking for dead wood, fishing twig and branch from the snow like you once did scraps from sewage. Wet wood, most of it, but still much better than the risk of running out of firewood in the night.

When you think to ask about watch, the mercenary shrugs, and answers your question by recalling the apparition she fought the Father with. You spend the rest of the evening haunted not by the ghost, but by the questions it leaves you too terrified to ask.

What is it that remains, behind the undead eyes of the lost Rhalâim?

If you were to find and dig up the corpse that once used to be yours, if you brought it to life as some Entropists do, who would be looking through its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

More questions dance across the back of your mind and eyelids, fleeting, formless, and all the more terrifying for their lack of definition. You try to grasp for words with which to give them shape, but the sounds all die in your throat.

You end up lying back to back with the mercenary, in a half-tent half-bed assembled from her bundle of cured pelts and a pile of coffins. The corpse of the second wolf, wrapped in some old linen, serves as your common pillow. The aptness goes uncommented, but it does not go unnoticed; neither of you sleeps all that much, instead trading quiet childhood stories throughout the night.

For all the awkwardness and lack of proper sleep, and for all that the apparition nags at the back of your mind, that one night proves to be your most comfortable in years. Restful in some vague, abstract form. Perhaps because of the fire, or your freedom from the Temple.

You wake up to what the mercenary tells you is a blizzard.

The weather sees you spend third and fourth days alike walking from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn again, making use of any little bit of calm in the storm. This rock, that outcropping, those trees — all are made into shelter from the northern winds for a while. All are quickly left behind, never quite sufficient. The days run into each other, a jumbled mess of blinding snow, aching legs, and cold meat. The exhaustion builds on along with your migraine, until a cloud of hollowness settles over your mind at the sight of the ghost hacking at wolves and bears.

You know you knew the man before. You recognize his silhouette, the line of his shoulders and the shape of his brow. You remember that your first glimpse of the ghost had surprised you, five days ago — just as you remember that you proceeded not to care. You had been more... _amused_... by the mercenary turning the Father's own lamb against him than scandalized by the fate of your so-called brother.

You knew him then. You _know_ you did. And yet his name escapes you now, no matter how deep you try to dig into your mind. So do his duties and his age, his reputation in the ranks, or even simply how far his bedroll had been from yours. Remains only a gaping hole and a vague sense of dread, as if some unseen hand had reached into your head and torn out the memories.

They'd been there just five days ago.

The inevitable question slips out on that fourth night, as migraine steals your sight and leaves you scrambling for context within a blinding void.

"How dead is he?"

You believe you are attempting to fetch wood when it happens, but you're not completely certain — your mind proves just as prompt to lose all track of itself when migraine blinds you as when meditation did. Still, fetching wood makes the most sense. You can do little in the wild but help to keep the fire fed, and you have been pondering firewood for the past days. The steps between green limb, wet limb, dead limb, and rotten limb. Wondering about the edges, about the point at which torn limbs can still sprout new roots into soil.

You hear the mercenary turn, the stop to her shuffling and the sound of her cloak brushing the ground. You hear that particular brand of silence that is usually accompanied by a perplexed frown.

Then she swears. Much, and angrily. In several languages.

"...That is one mess of a question," she replies in a tired voice once the swearing finally ends. You presume you must have sat down, because her words are clear, undisturbed by movement or distance. "Shit, I'm _sorry_. It might take a bit to lay down context for what you're really asking, and I'm self-taught, so I'd have to make up corny analogies instead of—"

" _How dead am I_ ," you ask on, ignoring her babbling. " _Am_ I dead? _Un_ dead? I don't feel dead, but all the reasons why I don't are things that your... _thing_ clearly does as well. I don't feel alive either. I don't feel anything. What's the difference? _Is_ there a difference?"

There is silence, for a long while, and you almost regret interrupting. But you know the mercenary enough by now to be sure that if you hadn't, the blathering would never stop. Yet for all that she falls silent, she does not provide an answer, and so you blunder on, trying to put the void that caught onto you into words.

"There wasn't a difference for — for Letho," you explain, and a shiver runs through your bones at the sound of your own voice. "His body was there, but... no, it wasn't even _his_ body, was it," you mumble in realization. "Just the... substitute. Why was it so — what's the turning point? Is there some—"

"You're alive, Letho's dead, and it's undead," the mercenary cuts across your words, and though sight does not register, you can hear her walking over and feel her sit down next to you. "The short answer is that you're _nothing_ like my apparition, and that I am _very fucking sorry_ I didn't rethink its presence. I just — you were fine with it before, and — shit!"

You hear her slap her own face with both hands a few times, as you saw her do after Qalian, after the mercenary, after Brother Hatred. You hear her take in a long breath, as if fighting to calm herself.

"The full answer is complicated," she lets out in a sigh, "and it is _guesswork_ , not research. Are you sure that you want _guesswork?_ It's done you enough harm as it is."

As if that could matter in any shape or form. Your entire life is guesswork. The past decade has been nothing but harm. More of either can hardly make a difference by this point. You care for the answer less than for a stop to the hollowness. You want the doubts, the shapeless questions, to be over. Dead and buried.

"I need this to be _done_ ," you say, hoping that the mercenary will read your intent in the word.

"...Okay," she finally answers, and you sigh in relief at having gotten through without five minutes' worth of digression this time. But then she stands back up, and her steps move away.

Before you can let out a word of complaint, however, the mercenary returns on your other side, and you can feel the weight of her cloak settle on your back. She wraps it around your shoulders, pulls the fur-lined cowl over your bare head, and sits back down next to you, sighing all the while.

"I'm not cold," you say, though you suppose the weather makes it by nature half a lie.

"That's not what it's for," she replies, but before you can ask what she means by that, she starts to explain at long last. "I don't know how the Rhalâs speaks of death, but if you're like most people here, you see it as either a place like the 'Eternal Paths' or as a... permanent state, of sorts. It isn't. The place doesn't exist, and the state is entropy. Death is different, although entropy _can_ lead to it. Death is... more or less a cardinal direction in the Sea of Eventualities."

You feel yourself blink at the words as you attempt to conjure some sort of mental image. Then you feel yourself _frown_ at the words, as sight refuses to comply even within the confines of your mind. Your rub your hands against your eyes, but the pressure does little save for making the migraine flare.

"Here," says the mercenary's voice, and after a few crackling sounds, you feel the cold wetness of snow slide across your forehead. "Rub it on a little. It helps a bit, or it does for me at least."

You feel your way into grabbing the compacted snow from her hand, and press it over your eyelids for a few seconds at a time. It's not a healer's cure nor an apothecary's balm, but it does numb some of the pain, if only a little. It's all you're getting, in any case. If the mercenary had a spell or potion to cure headaches, you figure she would have proposed it by now.

It's almost amusing, in its own dark, depressing way. Throwing fire at passersby? Any Arcanist can do that. Crushing minds with a thought? A Psionicist's bread and salt. Tearing out souls, raising the dead, building untold abominations out of rotting blood and bone? There always seems to be some Entropist working on it.

But curing a migraine? Good fucking luck with that.

"I'm fine," you tell the mercenary, once the throbbing has subsided enough for you to cast the snow aside. "Keep going."

It's only once the demand is out of your mouth that you realize it should have been preceded by 'thank you.'

"Sure," the mercenary agrees, probably long since used to your curtness. "So then, if it helps: imagine that the Sea of Eventualities is a big room filled with tables. Now take any of these tables, and imagine that it's a facet of time, with our reality as a map spread on top of it. The map covers the whole table, north east west and south, and we can go anywhere on it, provided we have the means that fit the terrain."

Simple enough, so far.

"But even though we don't see them on the map as such, there's actually two more directions we can go," the mercenary says, and you imagine from the sound of her chainmail that she is gesturing to illustrate her words. " _Up above the map_ , which escapes our facet of time into the rest of the Sea of Eventualities, and _down below the map_ , which collides with our facet of time and goes absolutely nowhere. That's what death is: running into the table and getting stuck in time. Still with me?"

You must have nodded, because she resumes once again.

"Alright. Now, undeath. Imagine that people are like boats sailing across the map, with their bodies as the hulls — sorry," she gives your shoulder a tap at the unfortunately familiar word, "and their souls as the sails. The hull by itself drifts, and the sail by itself sinks, so they have to be tethered to each other to go anywhere. Those tethers are usually a strong mast — _senses_ — and well-tied ropes — _memories_. But if there's, say, a big storm in the Sea of Eventualities while the ropes or mast are damaged, the sails — the _soul_ — can be torn off by the wind and make that move up or down. It still exists," she hurriedly insists. "It's just... off the map. Over the clouds or, more commonly, under the water."

You suppose this is why you feel like you are drowning on air so often. The less time you spend thinking of the vessel, the better — but if the hole your past made of your memories are its ropes, your soul has to be in a sorry state indeed.

"Now, the soul is just like actual sails," the mercenary presses on. "Whether the storm carried it up or down, it can't move back onto the map by itself, let alone bind memory-ropes to a sensory-mast. It doesn't have limbs to tie knots with. So unless someone catches it, or some magical wind moves it again, it's just... stuck. That's how undeath happens. The soul untethers, there's a big wave in the Sea of Eventualities, and the sails get thrown back onto the hull, rather than on the mast and ropes."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you let yours fall in your hands. A shaky breath escapes your chest.

Don't. Don't think about Letho. Not now. There's nothing to do there anymore. Letho is done, Letho is gone. Just as he always was. His corpse — not even his, not truly — just happened to keep walking for a few years.

...What had become of his body? The real one? You looked everywhere. The pit, the sewers, the waterways, even all the way through the crypts once you knew how to wield a blade. What had the Father done with him? Did you find him and simply push him out of your mind, like you did the screams and silence the mercenary told you of?

And what of that damn temple? Did you bury him then? You'd wanted to. You still do. You'd asked the mercenary to leave, and she had, and then...

...Then you'd woken up in the tent, and she was right there.

You can't remember. _You fucking can't remember._

"That's not what happened to you," the mercenary hurries to say once again, though she fails to catch up with your careening mind. "You're not undead. I _know_ that, because my spells don't harm you and I can't see your soul. Which means that it's tethered in place. Not mismatched, not damaged, not free to take."

'Not damaged'? It doesn't feel 'not damaged'. And what does 'not free to take' even mean? So what if it wasn't? It hadn't been before, and that hadn't so much as slowed down the Father, now had it? Let alone _stopped_ him. Clearly, anyone who knew how to undo the ties could do so at will, just as he did.

Just like the mercenary might. Where would her knowledge come from — where would _her ghosts and skeletons_ come from — if not keen interest and practice? You are not so blind as to believe her ever fully truthful with you, not after seeing her so freely take part in your lies. Not after noticing the long silences between your questions and her answers.

If you were to fall on these slopes, would you, too, wake up as an empty ghost, or as a shambling corpse?

How would you even know, before it was too late?

You clench your eyes tight and press hard against your temples, trying to force your mind into killing the suspicion. You cannot afford to let it take over the emptiness anger left in its wake. The woman can be daft, yes. Naïve even for a Sunchild, and much less mindful of consequences than she fancies herself to be. But as she is all that, she is also _steadfast_. Even at her most inane, as you disagreed on every last thing under the Sun, she was never anything but loyal to you.

You cling to that loyalty, even as naivety burns. Your past is gone. Your cause is gone. Your rage is gone. Letho is gone all over again. Your life is gone, fourteen years gone at that. Even your swords and bow are gone, presumably still on that cliff, though you can't recall leaving them. Your hideout still remains, but you cannot go there, and the mercenary knows of its location anyway. The woman's loyalty is the only thing you have left. You cannot let your doubts pry it away from you.

You blindly scrape the ground for another handful of snow, and press it against your forehead. It does little more for the migraine, but it does serve to distract the mind. The mercenary has begun to rub your back in what you assume she means as sympathy, but you tune the sensation out to concentrate on your hands. You focus on the cold, on letting suspicion seep out of your skull like the heat; imagine doubt running down your gloves with the melting ice.

It doesn't work, of course. You never were good at meditating, and the few things you _were_ good at are too tainted by circumstance to be of any use right now.

"So, to answer the things you really meant to ask," the mercenary continues, oblivious to your inner thoughts. "Did somebody 'create' you? No. Nobody can create souls, only dissipate them or move them. That's why we're all still stuck using Pyrean crystals. So what the," she pauses, "what _he_ did was halfway between casting a spell on you and giving you a wooden leg. He _altered_ you, yes, but he didn't _create_ you, only a 'hull you must transcend’, to use his own parlance. That shit he said was just his arrogance speaking. The only person with any right to call you their masterpiece is yourself."

"I know," you reply. And you do. Still, hearing the woman say it manages to be almost... comforting, somehow. Even if the thought of _this_ being the best that you could achieve only serves to drive needles in the wound.

"And are you dead? Well, you're not off the map, are you? You're not above the clouds, you're not underwater. You're here," she says, and she pulls your gloved hands away from your face to hold them in her own. "I'm still with you. We're walking south towards Frostcliff Tavern, it's snowing, it's cold, and it's _bloody fucking miserable_ , so we're definitely alive."

"Hurray," you mutter with all the sarcasm you can still work into your voice, and the mercenary grips your hands tighter in response.

At least you still have this, you tell yourself, focusing on her grasp and the melted snow on your brow. You have the cold to numb the pain, and a pair of hands willing to hold onto you rather than cast you away. An acquaintance, even, if one with a strong propensity for utterly failing to understand your point. You clench your jaw and grit your teeth, attempting to summon the determination you'd still possessed a week ago. So what if you have little left to your name? You've managed with much less, and done it twice at that. You can handle a third time.

The thought feels as hollow and empty as the mercenary's hands.

"Now for the... _messy_ parts," she keeps going, more hesitant this time. "Does that make you a different person than before the experiments?"

Your false heart skips a beat.

You call yourself Tharaêl Narys. You feel like Tharaêl Narys. You even remember being Tharaêl Narys — or at the very least remember some of it. But does that hold any meaning, if Tharaêl Narys was a corpse left to rot on the Father’s workbench? If his memories are halfway gone? Are they truly _his_ memories, or merely a copy of them? A set of old ropes wrapped around another's soul?

If you were to go find his corpse and have it brought to life again, who would look out of its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

"...Unless this body is a perfect copy of the previous one," the mercenary blunders on, "I'd say that yes, you are different. Very. But not in some fundamental sense of not being yourself," she interrupts your thoughts before they can spiral further. "You're still who you were yesterday, still who you were fourteen years ago. Rather, you're like... someone with permanent lycanthropy, or a piece of music meant for a lyre being instead played on a flute. Undergoing a change of form by itself induces a change of content, because the information is no longer processed in the same fashion. Some inevitably gets lost or otherwise displaced. _Still you_ ," she insists, "but different."

Okay. You but different. It sounds... trite. Almost nonsensical, really. But it's good enough. It will do. It's not like anyone is there to tell the difference anyway; anyone who remains only ever knew Brother Wrath. Nobody left alive knows Tharaêl Narys. Not even you, some days.

"And _were_ you dead," she continues, "as in did your sails get thrown into the water and remain there for a while? If what he said is true, yes. And you're probably," she hesitates again, "... _confused_ , or at least partly so, because you still have that sense of _up above the map_ and _down under the map_ existing even though you can't see them anymore. On top of that, your ropes, your memories, aren't tied to your new senses in quite the same place as before, which eight years of being taught to filter out your body can't possibly have helped. So you feel... poorly connected. Like you're detached from things, when you _are_ attached — just not where you expect to be."

Because it just figures. The Rhalâs simply has to be poison to you all the way down to the marrow. Of fucking course.

First the gutter, then the sewers, then an orphanage that sold you, then the Dust Pit, then a cult that tore out your soul in the most literal of ways. What next? Maybe you should tell the mercenary to double-check her ceiling. With your luck, it may just cave in the moment you get there.

You raise an arm to wipe your face with the back of your glove, and the mercenary's hand is dragged along with yours, her freezing steel gauntlet colliding with your nose.

"So sometimes," she goes on once again, waiting for you to be done to pull your hand back to your lap, "when things get very stormy, you... flicker. A big wave crops up, and since the ropes that tether your soul aren't in the same place as before, your soul gets _pulled_ by the wind a very little bit, for a very little while, in a way that you're not used to. Then the wave passes, and you come right back into place. And _that's_ what you are," she concludes, bringing your two hands together and clasping them between her own. "Not dead, not undead, just... very out at sea, and needing to tighten a few bonds here and there."

You take a long breath in. You let it out, slowly, attempting to discipline yourself into relaxing your jaw.

You take in another.

A third.

"What happens if the ropes break down," you manage to ask on the fourth, finally able to form words.

"They will not break down," she answers, adamant. "And if somehow they still do," she forestalls your remark, raising her voice even as you were opening your mouth to protest her optimism, "I can catch souls, and I have a friend who can bind them. I'm not going to let you drift, I'm not going to let you drown, and we're going to do our best to make you stormworthy again. Alright?"

It's stupid. It's optimism without thought, words without actions, good intentions without the slightest speck of actual planning to back them up. Hopes upon hopes upon hopes, resting on the shoulders of an outlander daft enough to still believe in fairytales such as friendship and fairness in the Undercity.

...Still, whatever it is, it's _there_. There and willingly shared with you. Not with Brother Wrath, or some masterpiece, or with some other mental construct only extant in their beholder's mind. With _you_. Tharaêl. Not Tharaêl Narys, perhaps, but Tharaêl who smirks and screams and stabs and keeps calling the woman the fucking idiot she is.

It's a hope and a prayer, but it's what you have, and it's clearly all you're getting. Maybe you can both make it through this stupid plan as well, like you somehow did the last one.

Your shoulders feel as if they are mere moments from turning to stone, and so you let your head fall back, hoping to relax the muscles of your neck a little. That plan finds itself thwarted by a dull thud, however, and a smattering of snow falls on top of your upturned face. It takes a few blinks for you to notice that you are staring at the underside of snow-laden branches. You must have had your back to a tree. You hadn't even noticed anything was there.

You have barely realized that you could see the branches by the time the migraine throbs, robbing you of sight once again.

You sigh.

"It all sounds so simple when put in your daft metaphors," you tell the mercenary, blinking out the melt of the snow that just dusted your cheeks.

"I did warn you I would be forced to make corny analogies," she says, sounding somewhat... _amused_ , somehow. "It is mostly accurate, though. If heavily, er... stylized."

" _That's not the point,_ " you snap, bringing your head back upright to look at — or rather blindly stare at — the direction her voice comes from. "Metaphors don't mend souls. They don't stop arrows. They don't fill the stomach or shelter from the mud. It doesn't matter how I feel or what pretty little thoughts you decide to have about it — it matters _what I can do_."

"...That would be why I offered my roof, yes," the mercenary replies, uncomprehending. "So you can figure out what you want to do."

"But I don't know what _can_ be done. For food, for money, for — for _anything_ , fuck it all. Not in the Upper City. As things are, I'm just going to end in the Pit all over again."

Or on another cliff, you do not say. The mercenary can likely deduce that one on her own.

She lets go of your hands, leaving you once again stranded in the white void. Mercifully enough, the silence does not last; you can hear her shuffle in place, creaking leather and crackling snow against the backdrop of the wind. Then you can feel the heavy hood settle against your scalp once more, its fur lining tickling the tips of your ears and eyebrows. It must have slid off when you let your head fall.

"You'll manage," she tells you as you hear her sit back down. "You need time to wind down, yes, but you have it. I have enough money to last us both a good long while. We'll be fine. Both of us."

That's a stopgap, at best. Not a true solution. You're unarmed, you're unskilled, you're Pathless, and it seems that to any competent Arcanist looking at you, you're also dead besides. Not the most auspicious of ways to start a new life anywhere, let alone in the damn city. But there's no point in telling her that, now is there? Having bought a house within Ark does not make the mercenary any less of an outlander. She would hear the words if you spoke, but she wouldn't _understand_ them. Just like she doesn't get them now.

You let your head fall back into your hands, but the mercenary soon pushes them away, grabbing you by the shoulders to pull you back to your feet. You let yourself follow the pull, stumbling a few steps once the difference in heights makes her hold more hindrance than assistance.

"You're tired and having an unbelievably bad week," the mercenary says, in a tone of voice that you take to mean the words are a conclusion. "Come on. I'll make you some windbreak, and you can rest as long as you want. Don't worry about the fire, food, or watch. Just lie down until you feel like getting up again. Take all the time you need. If it's an hour, it's an hour. If it's a week, I'll find us food and build us a tent."

You try to look at her, turning your head in the direction of her voice — and find out to your own surprise that you _can_ see her, if poorly. The white of all the moonlit snow still shoots fire into your brain, but the spots of black about her — her hair, her eyes, her clothes — are dull and dark enough for you to grasp the contours of. You gaze into that shapelessness, into those blobs of blackness dancing across the white void, and the shapeless question finally takes form as well, tumbling from your lips like so many stones on your back.

"If I hadn't killed him," you ask, and you despise the way your voice quakes as it forms the words. "If I hadn't killed Letho — could you have brought him back?"

The blobs of black flicker, and you wipe at your eyes, attempting to fend off the migraine and the light. But you feel melted snow run down to your chin at the gesture, and so you wipe harder, harsher. Willing the drops to fade away.

You don't cry. You can't afford to. Every tear is a chink daggers can use to reach your bones. You are exposed enough as is. No need to make your weakness worse.

"...There was no soul left there," the mercenary says, her voice almost lost in the wind. "I looked as hard as I could, but he was gone long before your swords ever touched his neck. I'm sorry."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. The mercenary's fingers dig into the wool and the leather stretched along your arms, uncomfortable in their hold and in their simple existence. You let go of your face, bat both her hands away.

She lets you.

"Try to sleep, Tharaêl," she says, blobs of black bobbing with her voice. "If things get in _any_ way truly dangerous, I'll teleport us home right away."

"Home," you echo the mercenary's silhouette, in a fruitless attempt to wring meaning out of the word.

"Yes," she insists, her voice still quiet and yet firm. "Home."

You stare at the shadow of her, at the uncertain shape of snowy trees against the bright night sky. You wonder what it is that determines the gap, that defines the difference between "Sister Pride, to be killed", "Brother Hatred, to step over", and "Brother Wrath, to be brought home."

You wish you knew what Letho saw, when he picked you to share his hay rather than any other child.

"...Okay," you tell the mercenary, resigned to finding no answers.

Of the fifth day and night, you recall only dreams. Nightmares, really. A rough push at your back. Masks in the night. Your swords cutting through bone. Sha'Gun in the temple. Your arms covered in blood. The old man begging for his son. Letho asking the Father whether or not to kill you. Reaching for his face only for it to melt and rot in your hands. The mercenary stabbing you and leaving you to die. Letho's body falling to pieces, combusting into unrecognizable charred meat. A head rolling across the tiles. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. And all the screams. So many screams. Then silence, and then nothingness, and beyond that a deep, dark void.

You are almost grateful for the glare of the snow when you wake up.

The mercenary says that you were more comatose than asleep, curled under the small tent of furs nailed to an old table that she had assembled for you. Says that she tried to shake you awake, slap you awake even, once you began tossing. Says that she could never manage.

You suppose there is luck in that. You could have done without the dreams, but thanks to that day's worth of sleep, the migraine becomes bearable.

That sixth day is... good enough. Your memories still flee you, but sight and sound are clear, the snow is less blinding, and the cold of the air feels crisp and clean on your face. You devour a breakfast of bear atop the bare wooden guard post you seem to have been sleeping on, then the mercenary and you set out for the Crystal Forest, infinitely grateful for its shelter from the wind. An idle argument on the nature of wisps springs up along the way, meant less for relevance than to busy the mind and fill the silence. You segue into theory upon theory, only rarely interrupted by spirits and elementals — which the mercenary in turn interrupts with her own.

The mercenary's ghosts are notably absent.

You feel somewhat... useless, standing there watching her. Almost enough to make you wish you'd kept your swords, wherever you left them. Or at least thought to keep your bow. What are you even doing, strolling unarmed and unarmored through the Northwind Mountains? Depriving your hired sword of her strongest weapon just to assuage your own fears? What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?

Your arrow pierces through the mercenary's neck, your swords through Brother Hatred's throat, Letho's head rolls across the tiles as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders, and the diffuse pink glow of the Crystal Forest returns to your awareness in a gasp.

 _That_ , the memories say, in their infinite wisdom. _That_ is what is wrong with you. _That_ is what you are doing, what you are striving to avoid, strolling unarmed and unarmored.

You try to push the thoughts out of your mind's eye as you walk, but you never truly succeed.

You ask the mercenary about weapons themselves, eventually, in an attempt to redirect your focus from their use to their abandonment. She seems rather unconcerned by their absence, however. She can handle elementals and many more besides, she says, cheeks flushed with anger, or perhaps disapproval. She can do it with or without your assistance, thank you, and with or without ghosts. You put your swords to good use anyway, she adds, and it felt wrong to take them back. Better to leave them to the mountains, serving to mark Letho's grave.

You did bury him, then. That's... good. A net improvement on the dreams. You still cannot recall one bit of it, but the knowledge that you did go through with your plan makes the memories less pressing to recover. All that matters it that it was done. That whatever remained of Letho's soul was laid to rest, and that you were there. The details are irrelevant.

Gods, you buried Letho.

You buried Letho and it only took you an entire fucking decade spent failing to recognize anything from his stature to his voice. You _lived_ with him, for fuck's sake. You saw him almost every day! How did you manage to be so fucking blind?! And how many bodies did it even take you to get there? The old man and his family, the 'handful' for the Rhalâta, the handful you didn't quite kill but drove to their deaths anyway, the other Rhalâim, the other mercenary... Would you have killed the mercenary walking by your side right now, if you'd had no other sacrifice to give before the door of the Room of Paintings? And how many dozens did you kill in the Pit? You don't even remember.

Some fucking brother you are. Some fucking friend.

You shake the thought out of your head, willing doubt and regret away, and resume your slow trek southwards in the mercenary’s wake.

When you reach sight of the tavern at last, on the evening of that sixth day, the last light of the sun is fading from the peaks. The mercenary's pace progressively slows down, before coming to a dead stop right in the middle of the road. You are the one who needs to prod at her, for once, for her to admit to her issue.

Which happens to be the Rhalâs sitting for all to see right in-between your eyes.

You would be angry at yourself for the gross oversight, but you mostly just feel disturbed. You've been dodging your own reflection for years because of the damn brand, donned hoods and headbands whenever needing to slip out of sight. It's barely been a week; how did you manage to forget it was there already? If your mind is wandering that much, there may in fact be merit to the mercenary's delaying. Frostcliff's denizens may not have thought much of one stray Rhalâim, but Ark's city guard would likely not have been quite so kind.

The mercenary observes the brand, pokes at it with a steel-gauntleted hand, then claims that there may be a rather simple solution. Scars don't take to magic too well, but this one is rather shallow by virtue of its location; a simple pass of skinning knife should expose fresh tissue, raw and recent enough to cure. She could heal that cleanly, she thinks, like she did all your other wounds.

She'd been wary of offering without Ambrosia close at hand, she says, but with a good bed to rest in — and a 'colleague' to barter with in Frostcliff — the issue is as good as gone. Why spend time and effort hiding something she can simply remove?

You've seen her wield her skinning knife enough to trust her skill with it, and maybe getting a good look at a piece of your artificial flesh will... help things sink in, somehow. You've worn the Rhalâs across your face and shoulders more than enough. Those years are gone; so should it be. You hesitate only for an instant, before taking up the offer as wholeheartedly as you can.

You lie back onto a nearby rock, tilting your head upwards as far as it will go. It feels alien and familiar all at once, movement and position well known, but the starry skies overhead as foreign as a brand new land. You find yourself looking up at the mercenary too, for once. A strange experience in itself, after so many days spent striving to recall to look _below_  your shoulder level when trying to catch her eyes. She tests your forehead with a thumb, pinches and twists the skin, determining depth and angle — and you find yourself wishing she would simply get things over and done with.

The mercenary leans over you, eyes and blade-bearing hand focused on your forehead, framed by the dark night sky and the light of the moon.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding, framed by the blue light of a spell cast in your direction.

Your hands dive to your hips, but they grasp only air; you try to step away, and back into hard rock. You open your mouth to bark a question, yet find yourself winded, breath coming in short bursts and ears filled with nothing but the drum of your racing pulse. Cornered, you blink, once, twice — but still the change of scene refuses to make sense, leaving you to cast your gaze about in a vain quest for answers.

It strikes you, as you look around, how unfamiliar the sight is. The lines of the peaks, the texture of the snow and rocks, all of it is alien to you. The Temple had held its own grandeur, especially in torchlight, but even it had been held between the cave's walls, had stooped under its ceiling. There had always been rock, wherever your eyes went. Not so here. Here there is sky, there is distance — and there is _horizon_. The Temple had never had one. Nor had the Undercity. Not even the Upper City, the handful of times you'd been there.

The world had been aborted. Stopped in its tracks by rock walls. And yet now that you're freed from them, you keep feeling that if you stumble you will fall into the sky.

Your thoughts come to a brutal stop, as you find yourself riveted by the sight of droplets of blood splattering across the blue glow. You raise a hand to your face, and it comes away slick and red, as a sharp burning pain flares to life in its wake.

"Fawhaêl?"

Your follow the voice by instinct, and your gaze returns to the mercenary, still bracing herself on the ground. You'd forgotten she was there. Her eyes meet yours, wide and dull black, from behind the blue shimmer of her spell—

—and the details do not add up. It is her off hand that faces you, not the one she casts fire with, and all her spells drain, burn, or freeze. They do not lacerate, do not cause wounds that bleed. She does not seem to be angry, let alone attacking you. Her posture isn't aggressive. It's _defensive_ , if anything. Worried, even, judging from the line of her brow. The spell is a shielding one. You've seen her cast it many times. You've seen her act like this before, back in—

You blink.

Back in _the orphanage_.

Shit. Did you have a... a 'seizure' again?

"...Yeah," you answer both her call of your name and your own mind, letting your gaze flutter about for more hints of context. "Yeah, I'm — what happened?"

The mercenary's head rolls back in visible relief, and her shielding spell winks out.

"Sh'fhine," she slurs, reaching out with one hand to brace herself on rock. She drags herself to her knees with a groan, starts to fish around the belt bags where she keeps her potion stock. "Yuhr ohhay, I'm ohhay. You fhunch like a fugghin fhroll, ut I'm ohhay."

Your vision starts to spin as you eyes flick from blood to rock to snow, and suddenly your head feels like it's set adrift, unable to fully focus on the mercenary's words. You let the rock at your back bear your weight, and turn your face up to the sky, using the stars as reference by which to gauge the accuracy of your sight.

The trembling lines take a moment to fully resolve into dots.

"What did I do," you ask, once you feel sure enough of your own senses to resume your question. "I don't — this didn't happen when I got the brand done."

"Sh'fhine," the mercenary reiterates between snorts, spitting what you suppose is the blood running down her throat. "You had an ehhisode. Shudda sheen iss gommin. Whir gud. Khenna heal fhad?"

It takes you a confused moment to parse her words, caught as you are by the remnants of the sensation of slipping from your own grasp. It takes more moments still for your eyes to return to her in response, and for her extended hand to reach through the fog of confusion that is blanketing you. But it _does_ reach, eventually, and you give the mercenary a silent nod in response.

You tune out her ministrations as you focus inward, slowly reining your breath and pulse back under your control.

A few potions and spells later, the mercenary's nose and lip are in one piece again, and your forehead no longer bleeds. Your garments, however, can hardly say the same, and you are left to clean what looks like a pint of blood off yourselves with nothing but handfuls of snow. A lost cause if there ever was one.

"Sorry," you tell the mercenary.

You don't know what else to say.

"I've set you on fire twice," she replies, shrugging. "I kind of deserve it for being so bloody stupid, honestly. Yes, let's take a knife to _Tharaêl's_ head and make light of it! What could possibly go wrong?"

"What did you say?"

The mercenary's eyes raise from their inventory of her ever-shortening stock of medical supplies to throw an exasperated glare in your direction.

"I am _not_ daft enough to repeat it, thank you very much."

...Fair. Grating, but fair. You recall broken noses to be a rather annoying experience. You let the mercenary proceed with her sorting of her stocks in silence, allowing your eyes to wander across the ground and rocks — and the blood staining them.

"...The brand," you finally remember, and you run a hand across your forehead by rote, finding it eerily smooth and tender. "Did it work?"

"Yes," the mercenary says, her frown turning into a smile as she packs the last of the potions and salves back into her bags. "Well, we look like we butchered our way down the road and you really need a shave, but your face is as smooth as it ever gets and I've got hides to salt and hang, so we can blame the bears, and — _whoah_."

Your eyes whip back to the mercenary, only to find hers open wide, their uniform blackness staring as if through you.

"What?"

"I'm fine, don't worry," she answers, but the way she lengthens each sound would tend to say the opposite. "I'm contemplating the extent of our luck, I think. Shit. It hasn't been this bad in a long time. The visions, not our luck. Our luck is great."

"Great," you echo in pure disbelief.

Visions? What the fuck is the bloody idiot going on about, this time?

"Well, this version of you is sporting a rather distinct lack of being dead," she says, "and I am not dragging your corpse. So I think yes, we're doing great. Sucks to be alternate us, though."

"Arcanist's fever," you deduce.

You've never experienced the sensation yourself, but you've been there as others did, in the Pit and the Temple both. Messy moments, those were, some of them with messier endings still. None ever outright _saw_ into other realities as the fever hit, however. That, or they never mentioned it.

"Yeah," the mercenary confirms your guess. "Ambrosia and some rest, and I'll be good as new. The shady guy near the back tables always has some. Don't worry. I can trade him some books for it."

Which means that both of you are unable to defend yourselves, and fully dependent on the assistance of a 'shady guy' who may or may not be present. Fantastic. Utterly grand.

You open your mouth to tell the mercenary of the flaw in her plan, only to let it close again. You look at her face, her _flushed_ face, and it dawns upon you that its red never came from anger. She had been crimson-cheeked this morning already. Yesterday, you had slept; the days before, you hadn't been able to see — and the day before _that_ , you hadn't been able to _care_.

How long has her fever been 'this bad', exactly? Since the blizzard? Since the Father? The bloody fucking idiot. You wonder if her alternate selves are as daft and red-cheeked as she is.

You wonder why they drag your corpse.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you try and you try again to put it back where it belongs, to erase the image of the headless _thing_ on the ground, of your swords going through its neck, of its eyes turning to the Father as if you'd never existed. But the blood is too slippery, gravity too unforgiving. Time too immutable. The corpse remains a corpse, no matter what you do.

The woman's eyes keep flicking to your left, running along the lines of something she alone can see. You pick up her backpack with one hand, grab her shoulder with the other, and half-push, half-guide her from the bloody rocks back onto the snowy trail.

"Let's get ourselves indoors," you say.

The woman nods, and you set down the road to cross the final few yards to the inn; her opening the way at an unsteady pace, you standing at her back, making sure she does not stumble.

The place is a simple enough structure from the outside. Old wood, stones older still, a handful of dirty windows. If not for the snow and the sky, you could imagine it fitting in the Undercity. Along Glimmerdust Lane, perhaps. Next to the orphanage, even. But as soon as you pass the stray drunkards to walk through the door, the impression vanishes like the illusion it was. The game tables are there, as are the exhausted patrons and bards singing their tired songs, but the room has a _warmth_ to it, a sense of hospitality to its air, that even the Refuge on its very best days had never so much as approached.

It's an inn like any other, and yet it's too vivid. Too loud. Too everything at once. You feel your shoulders tense at the lack of dark corners, your hands twitch at the lack of weapons to grab if need be. You know nobody here.

You _are_ nobody here, for better and for worse.

The mercenary points to a table close to the hearth, where an old, cowled man pores over a stack of books. Following the unspoken request, you half-push half-carry her across the sunken area that serves as the inn's entrance, help her over the few steps leading to the dining room proper. She greets the old man much like you would greet your own contacts, and a mere few minutes of bartering later, both she and the man are smiling — him over an old tome you gather must have been priceless, and her at an armful of familiar vials.

"Dinner," she proclaims with a smile.

"You better have some pennies left to buy me a real one," you retort with a frown.

The woman breaks into laughter as she uncorks her Ambrosia, and you follow her to the counter in the middle of the room, finding yourself chuckling as well. Maybe from the absurdity of it all. Maybe from sheer raw nerves.

The innkeeper is as warm as her hearth and tavern, and just as cloying to your mind. She grates against your skin and bones, leaving you wanting nothing so much as running back into the snow. The mercenary, for her part, seems unaffected by it all. She smiles at the woman, looks through her purse, and looks at you — then she books a 'small room for two' until 'the start of the new week'.

"This night and three more days," she tells you on the stairs, still relying on you to walk in a straight line. "Board included if reasonable — some meat and vegetables are okay, but start pawing at the desserts and you'll be paying extra fees. You can go down for some rabbit once we're done settling in."

It would likely not do to start an argument right on the stairs, within sight and hearing of all. So you wait until you make it across stairs and second floor both, the door of the small room closed securely behind your back.

"I thought we were going to Ark," you say once the mercenary is seated safely on the bed.

"We are," she confirms, taking a pause in her drinking of her second vial. "But I want this to work out, so I'm maximizing your chances first, and step one of that is drinking all of this Ambrosia and sleeping an entire day. Then there's letters I need to ask the Myrad Keeper to deliver, and — well, let's just say dumping you onto the marketplace right now doesn't strike me as a good idea."

"I managed just fine by myself for twenty years," you retort, the mercenary's condescension serving to destroy your patience. "You don't need to _baby_ me, damn it. I'm not a fucking child."

The mercenary's brow furrows, and she cocks her head to the side.

"I don't doubt that you can deal, Tharaêl. I've _seen_ you deal with much, much worse. But can you deal in a way that doesn't leave bruises or draw blood? _This_ ," she says, pointing to her slightly bruised nose, "is what I'm wary of. Your reflexes are adjusted for _surviving under_ Ark, not _living within_ it, and they're honed to a fault. Hence, a few more days to process things, ask anything you want to ask, and practice coexisting with tired and drunk surfacers."

The rational part of your mind thinks of swords best left to a grave, of allies best not alienated, and of heads rolling across tiles. But the feeling part of your mind, the part that wields the swords and kills the friends and cuts off heads, breaks through your fraying nerves like water through a dam. You whirl on the mercenary, fists clenched over nothing, voice catching on thin air.

" _Practice,_ " you snarl, putting all the contempt you can in the word. "You think I need to _practice_ spending time around tavern lowlives? Where do you think I spent my fucking days, these past ten years? Do you even _listen_ to what you're saying, for fuck's sake?"

"I think the uniform you wore has handled the problem for you," the mercenary says — and though her eyes follow your hands, her own hands, she folds in her lap. "I think you relied on it much more than you realize. Are you going to hit me again?"

The question pierces through your heart as surely as any blade would, and drains the anger out of you faster than any weapon could.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it were a ball that had fallen from his shoulders.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding.

You let the backpack fall to the ground and turn back without a word, through the small room's door, through the second floor, through the back entrance you'd spotted on your way up the stairs. But you have barely taken a few strides into the snow when the realization hits that you have nowhere else to go.

You stare at the shadow that you guess to be Northwind Peak, towering over the landscape, dark even against the night sky.

You should have let yourself fall.

You should have fucking _jumped_.

The fatigue of the week descends back onto your shoulders, and you let yourself sink to the ground in the middle of the road. You brace your elbows on your knees and let your head rest in your hands, as unwilling to walk further as you are to go back inside.

You've been sitting there for a while when you hear the snow crackle at your back a few times, and then a heavy weight fall on the ground right next to you. A steel-gauntleted hand puts a plate in your line of sight, its contents leaking steam like a small stream of clouds.

Roasted rabbit and potatoes.

The woman scoots closer, fidgets for an instant, and you find yourself wrapped in her cloak all over again. She pulls the edges together, enfolding the both of you in the warm wool and rabbit fur, then takes a swig from a bottle you assume to be Dal'Sark Mead before setting it down in front of you. She sets her own plate on her knees, picks apart a piece of ribs with her bare hands and teeth.

After a few minutes, you start to do the same, allowing the food and the drink to return their warmth to your limbs.

The mercenary sits with you in the snow until dawn, gazing first at the stars, then at the way the rising Sun chases them out of the heavens in a burst of crimson and blue.

Neither of you speaks a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titled after "To Nowhere" by Emily Bindiger and Yuki Kajiura. 
> 
> Song and lyrics [here on the fic's Tumblr mirror](https://vanithesquidwrites.tumblr.com/post/185292957962/to-wait-until-i-am-done-editing-chapter-2-into-a).


	2. Submerge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention I was slow? Because, uh, turns out, I'm slow. Sorry!
> 
> Adding the title songs to the end of each chapter. Chapter 1's has been retroactively added, for those who wish to check or like to discover music. =)

You can't say that you've ever had much issue with yourself, especially not by Rhalâim standards.

...Well, much issue with your... _physical_ self, that is. Your vessel. Your mind was a minefield as far back as you remember, and you always knew it, if not the full extent of it. Your body, however, had been reliable. Comforting in its constancy. Jittery on dry days, deathly sick on wet ones, and tense as a bowstring on all of them, certainly — yet nevertheless always _there_. Supporting you through thick and thin to the best of its ability.

Your lungs had admittedly been a complete disaster, especially early on, but you hadn't much cared once Letho took you in. Your scrawny limbs had come with the height expected of Aeterna, with quick footing, agile fingers, and genuinely impressive aim. Your thin frame proved an advantage when you first walked into the Pit, and when you finally put on weight, thanks to the meat and mushrooms victory let you afford, all of it was wiry muscle, strong and lean enough to dance along and around blades.

Your body hadn't merely been your vessel. It had been your temple. The one and only roof to have never caved in nor let you down. The single home to have held strong, no matter whether it was hunger, blades, bandits, or the Rhalâta itself banging on its doors. 

Yet for all of its usefulness, for all its speed and size and strength, your favorite of its features had never been any of those. No — it had been your skin.

You'd always been festooned with scars, even long before the Pit. You had chased every rat, you'd finished every fight — albeit on the floor — and you had climbed the walls in the most literal fashion, active yet weak enough to fall from every ledge and roof in the Undercity. But those scars had never been anything but an advantage, and all the more so once the Dust Pit came to add its own fair share. They were proof of a gift for enduring in spite of pain, proof of a gift for _survival_ , in caves intimidation ruled second only to the Rhalâs. You might have carved some into your flesh yourself, had it somehow made it out of your childhood unblemished.

Through your years as a Rhalâim, on those nights wrath was not enough and memories faded away, you always found a measure of comfort in that scarred skin. Every last burn, pit and blemish was a testament to _before_ , a world beyond the Rhalâta, resurfacing for air when the mask and the robes came off. A criss-crossing web of memories, stretching from toes to fingertips, wrapped around your bones more comfortably than silken cloth. On those nights — on nightmare nights — you would tiptoe between bedrolls, volunteer for any duty that would take you into the caves, and there, hidden in dark corners, you would take your gloves off to cradle yourself in your scars, in the little reminders of why you were there at all.

All of the others, your so-called family, had shunned the pain of life and the marks it left on their hulls. You had embraced it. Reveled in it. Relished the way each cut and bruise would sting against the Temple floors, throbbing along with your heart, a myriad small treasons you could privately indulge in. Letho's face would often fade, and wrath could sometimes abate; scars stood eternal, untouched by the Father's words. He had taken your family, taken your home, taken your memories, even taken your name, your hair, and your choice of clothes — but he could never erase the past from your skin, and every look at your bare hands, every glance of your exposed arms, kept the pain that propelled you ever onward fresh and new. Sharp. Honed and ready for battle, just like your body always was.

Throughout all of those empty years, wrath and revenge may have buoyed you, and lies and murder sheltered you, but it had been that blanket of old wounds that kept you warm at night.

And so here you fucking are, former Voice of the Father, former Champion of the Pit, petrified by the sight of soap.

You throw an angry glance at the offending object, still sitting in the mercenary's hand, on the other end of the bath.

You had been doing _well_ , so far. Not one serious argument in three days, be it with the tavern patrons or the mercenary. One small scuffle on the first day, yes, but an hour spent chopping wood outside with the woman had calmed your nerves as efficiently as balm on a wound. From then on, nothing had gone amiss. Not even when the woman argued you should bathe before leaving. You'd carried the washtub upstairs, brought up your half of the water, offered the innkeeper to wash the linens afterwards if she would lend you a cauldron to heat water by the fire. You'd managed to undress. To sit in the water. You'd even managed to convince the mercenary that sharing the washtub would be practical, less likely to leave her with naught but cold water and you with nothing but silence to try and occupy your thoughts.

You'd much rather have slept alone, and bathed alone, and  _been_ alone — but if there is any lesson of value to take from the past few days, from the cliff and the travel and all the empty years before them, it's that you don't actually handle being alone very well.

All your small compromises with isolation had worked _perfectly_ , too, from the forced politeness to making yourself share the bath. You hadn't slipped, not even once. Not until that damn soap, lying inconspicuous in the woman's outstretched hand, forcing you to acknowledge your skin all over again. To realize that your temple had stood on rotten foundations.

That its artificial flesh has never been yours at all.

You look down at the hands, clenching a wet rag in the lap. You look at the burns and the old scars, half-hidden under bloody grime and the wrinkles of bathwater. You try to find a truly old one, one that could precede the Rhalâta, the Dust Pit, the Father, the experiments. The time you had been daft enough to try and lift Letho's so-called kettle from the fire with your bare hands. The time you sliced your thumb open peeling potatoes with Torus, and Sha'Gun had to sew it closed herself while Letho held your arm. The time you threw Nessah's stupid old wooden bear onto the roof, and Letho wouldn't speak to you until you'd rubbed your fingers raw climbing to retrieve the damn thing.

You think, and look, and think and look some more, turning the wet limbs to and fro in the candlelight — but the years down in the Pit have made patchwork out of the skin, and nothing looks so much like an old childhood scar than scores upon scores of others.

You wish you could have fought with Brother Sorrow and survived, somehow. Or been disciplined by him at some point. Or even simply not — not _done what you had_. Perhaps then you would have something real to remember Letho by, rather than the tatters of a dead child's memories. But no, that would only be yet more masquerade, wouldn't it? Brother Sorrow was no more Letho than Brother Wrath was Tharaêl Narys, in the end. Just a pair of counterfeit echoes chancing to meet in the void, both pretending that they were real.

"Tharaêl?"

The name brings you back to the present, to the half-filled washtub and the mercenary you share it with. She looks even smaller, even more out of place, without her steel plate to add some bulk to her diminutive frame. Wrapped in nothing but a towel, she looks almost childlike; as if time parted ways with her when she was all of twelve winters and then chose to return only two full decades later, to carve wrinkles across her face and spatter her with the small burns you had mistaken for freckles.

She sits staring at you, black hair dripping dirty droplets, black eyes empty as ever — yet the tilt of her head manages to convey concern, somehow. The hand that had been holding the soap is folded onto her lap, the soap itself nowhere to be seen.

"I was trying not to interrupt," she says, sounding almost apologetic, "but you still haven't so much as _begun_ to wash, and you've been staring at your hands for a good five minutes. Did I miss a sprain or bruise? Is something wrong with them?"

"...Aside from _their not being real?_ " You stare at the mercenary woman in disbelief, uncertain whether to feel contemptuous or insulted. "What do you _think?!_ "

"I don't _know_ what to think, Tharaêl, which is why I'm asking you." She straightens herself a little, folding back her legs to bring her knees level with her chest then prop her arms on top of them. An innocent enough gesture, if you could not see all too well that its purpose is to create distance, to erect barriers of bone between her torso and your hands. "Whatever else they may or may not be, they _are_ yours. This _is_ your body. It's the same as fourteen years ago, remember? That still hasn't changed."

You do remember, of course. After three days of calm and of the migraine receding, you remember perfectly well.

'The same as fourteen years ago.' Comforting words, in the abstract, while stranded on snowy slopes and desperate for direction — but damning ones in retrospect, once able to think clearly. Fourteen years ago means the Corpse Pit. Late enough to place arena and Rhalâta on your shoulders, while snatching home and family from underneath your feet.

To Tharaêl Narys, Letho and the Refuge.

To the man born among corpses, the Child Killer of the Dust Pit, Brother Wrath of the Rhalâta? Only anger, death, and the void.

All for nothing, twice over. No result, for no reason.

The soul is the same, the mercenary said. But in practice, what does she know? She has not studied the Rhalâs, has not read through the Father's notes. She has _no idea_ what he did or how his experiments worked. She is self-taught, by her own words, guessing her way through your memories and the Father's soft-spoken lies. A talented Sleeper, but a Sleeper all the same.

"Can I?"

Your eyes return to the woman as her voice pushes past your thoughts, and you find her own open hands held out towards you.

"Look at them," she says, clearly mistaking your reticence for lack of comprehension. "Can I? It's fine if you don't want to, I just — I might see something you don't." 

You hesitate for an instant, torn between your constant desire for more information and your increasing reluctance to being examined. You enumerate to yourself the reasons for and points against, the whies and why nots of giving the woman insight into you, be it your vessel or your mind. Still, in the end, one thing alone affects the decision you make: that the woman was as disgusted with the Father as you were.

You give her your left hand, let her splay it over her knees. She angles it this way and that to better catch the candlelight, folding the fingers one by one, comparing the pulse to her own with a thoughtful frown. She pinches the false flesh, presses into it hard, indents it with a nail to observe how quickly marks fade. How fast the blood — if it  _is_  blood — resumes it flow under the skin.

"...It certainly feels and looks just as real as my own hands to me. You even have skin spots and ridges on your nails," she mutters, eyebrows arching upwards in interest. "I honestly can't tell that anything's amiss at all."

You can hear the _awe_ in her voice. The wonder at the Father's work.

_You always were my masterpiece._

You startle and jerk the hand back at the memory of the words, water sloshing against the washtub with the force of your recoil. His masterpiece. _Hah_. Yeah, right. As if someone half as careful and secretive as the Father would leave anything of value to rot in the Corpse Pit! What a fucking joke. To think that you even _believed_ him, for a short moment. Had you been _that_ fucking desperate?

You clench the hands together against your stomach, curling inward around them. Fuck this. Fuck it all. Fuck this— this— this _casing_ the Father had padded with you. Fuck the Father for making it. Fuck the woman for fucking _admiring_ his fucking work. Why did you even come here? What are you _doing?_  Did you think this... this _strangeness_ would somehow just melt away, if you distracted yourself long enough?

"Shit. Sorry. I — I shouldn't have said that."

You uncurl the hands again, staring at the shadow of what is passing for your veins, imagining the flow of whatever serves as your blood. How had the Father even put it all together? Was it built through magic? Grown in some vat? Did he sew the parts to each other somehow, fake guts, false skin and mock-up bone, then shove your soul inside like one would stuffing in a doll? How long had you laid bare on his table, like an insect pinned under glass, a trinket for him to toy with? Did he mold your vessel, did he mold _your soul_ , like so much clay within his hands, just like he did those past eight years? Did his fingers roam beneath your ribs like yours once did through dead bodies, bits of flesh stuck under the nails, blood slathered up to the elbows?

Do traces of him still remain hidden inside of you somewhere? Some mark within the flesh, some signature on bone?

To think you'd believed he might have whored you off to some Sublime, once. Thought that _that_ sort of violation was the worst he'd done to you.

"...Tharaêl?"

The thought makes your head spin, and you try to shake it away like you did headaches and nightmares, but no amount of force or speed seems to dislodge it from your mind. There you had been, mocking the other Rhalâim as they covered from head to toe, playing at pretend brotherhood while smirking at them in contempt. There you had been, the one true disgusting pile of flesh all along, and yet too much of a Sleeper to even begin to notice.

"Tharaêl. _Wake up_. Wherever you've gone, _you're not there_."

...That's right, isn't it? You're not here. You've never been here. Only some puppet of the Father's, thinking itself a long-dead child. Holding onto that dead child's memories of his just-as-dead brother, as if he could even recognize whatever you had become. Why would he? You had never met. What need did Brother Sorrow have for some delusional construct? What need did dead Letho have for pretenders clinging to his memory?

The arms hang limp and the chest feels hollow, heartbeat silent, skin gone numb. Air comes in unsteadily. Vision trembles. No, not vision — shoulders. Hands on shoulders. Not the vessel's hands. Shaking? Why would—

—pain erupts on the left side of your face, and your sight violently swivels. Punch? No, too light. You catch yourself on the wet wood of the washtub's edge, blinking in confusion, and raise your left arm to block any further oncoming hits as you turn your head to locate the source of the blow.

The mercenary looks back at you, right arm extended in what you guess to have been a slap.

Time seems to stretch for a moment, with her arm still held out, your own arm still held up, and your stomach churning with the disgust of your last thoughts. But the moment passes, and so does the tension. You let your arm lower, and the woman does the same.

"Thank you for not striking back," she says with an uneasy smile, but you feel so nauseous that you can only nod in response. "Are you alright?"

You almost want to laugh at the sheer stupidity of the woman's question — and you do, for a few seconds, your shoulders quaking all over again. But then the cackles turn to gasps and the gasps themselves into coughs, and you stumble out of the washtub to vomit on the inn's floor.

"Shit," you hear the woman say amidst splashing sounds, somewhere around the edges of your blurring vision. "I'll go grab some rags. Sit down. Here," her wet footsteps approach, and you can feel her put something between your hands. "Bucket."

You nod in silent gratitude, retching into the wooden pail until the vessel can produce nothing more but dry heaves.

The taste of vomit in your throat sends your mind back to simpler times. Better times, really, in the end. Knees in the gut in the Dust Pit, old bread just a little _too_ old, water you'd forgotten to boil. Everything had been so clear, then. No questions of who you were — of _what_ you were — or what you would do the next day. Only the routine of survival, of blades kept sharp and chainmail mended, your stomach filled with whatever had been within reach of your hands. No Seers nor mercenary to cast every word into doubt. No Father to play with your body and mind like you were his toy, to be thoughtlessly cast aside the moment he thought you broken.

"Do you think you can keep going?"

You raise your eyes from the bucket to meet the mercenary's gaze. She kneels off to your side, wrapped in a brand new dry towel, another bucket in her arms — that one filled with vomit-soiled rags. You take a breath in, let it out, wipe your mouth with the back of a hand.

"Yeah," you answer her, pushing your own bucket aside. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"And I'm Loram Waterblade risen from the grave to save mankind," is the woman's response, and you would snap back, were it not for her apologetic smile. "But you truly _do_ need to wash. Well, anyway, I'm already done, so I can leave if that makes you more comfo— alright," she interrupts herself as you shake your head no. "If you want me to stay, I stay. But I _am_ staying out of the washtub and putting on a shift."

"Why? No," you mutter, head still spinning. "I can—"

"—Overestimate yourself because you don't want to seem vulnerable, and end up making everything harder to do in the process? Yes, you can definitely do that," the mercenary retorts, voice kind and mellow to the point of condescension. "Which is why I am going to go cover up some more and spare your ex-Rhalâim arse the discomfort it won't admit to."

That's not— that's _not it_ , your mind wants to scream as she turns to fetch clothes. That's _not_ what the problem _is_ , damn it. How can the mercenary feel so fucking self-important as to think you give a damn?! You've seen your fair share of bodies, each one more mundane than the last. You've seen them bared to entice, bared to humiliate, eaten alive by fleshmaggots and shitting themselves in the dust. You don't care about _any_ of them, and about hers least of all, as long as their flesh never comes into contact with yours.

The problem isn't her stupid, small, weak mess of a body. The problem is that _your_  vessel can't be kept at a distance. The problem is that you can scrub with all the soap the world can hold, and your skin will still be a lie. The problem is that if even the woman can't bear to see it like this, then the one person to have _helped_ , the only one to have stuck by you in _over fourteen fucking years_ , will leave you over _embarrassment,_ of all stupid fucking things.

And once she's gone, who will stand between you and the damn window? Who will pull you back from the cliff, the next time the void comes calling?

...Why are you even _thinking_ this? This isn't you. You don't stop and ponder help and bare skin when washing. You don't focus on dying or on whatever the future holds. You're a _survivor_. You focus on _now_.

 _This. Isn't. You._  This is only the vessel trying to assert control, to bend your spirit to its will by drowning it in emotion. Equations and chemical imbalances, all of it. You need to be more objective, to remind yourself of the chasm between sensation and truth. Flesh does not get to dictate to the mind what it should think. Let alone _false_ flesh. You know better than to succumb to as petty an urge as this.

You exhale at the thought and squeeze your eyes shut tight, pinching the bridge of your nose between your fingers in frustration. From the Rhalâs to numbness to disgust right back to the Rhalâs. You have no other weapon with which to fend off intrusive thoughts.

That's the whole issue, isn't it. That tearing off your mask and brand can hide the Rhalâs out of sight, but that it will never let you carve it out of your bones, scrape it from underneath your skin like dirt from under fingernails. You can escape the Rhalâta, you can call yourself Tharaêl, but you will still remain a Rhalâim no matter what you do. Because for you to be able to call this mind and memories yours, you need to accept that the Father gave you your soul and vessel — and for you to accept the Father gave you your soul and vessel, you need the Rhalâs to force pain and disgust from your mind.

There's no way out. There never was. There'd been the fall, but you've fought it back long enough to grow afraid of the idea, to _want_ to be pulled away from windows, cliffs, and banisters. To hear the mercenary talk of long-dead souls still stuck in place.

To wonder what _happens_ to souls, once bodies shatter on the ground.

Maybe you should pursue another sort of radical option. Shock yourself out of your feelings by flooding them with stronger ones. Drink yourself under a table, hire the nearest pair of whores, get your life's worth of revulsion done and over with in minutes. You chuckle to yourself as you try to picture the scene: Brother Wrath, pissed-out drunk, framed by the Silver Cloud's harlots in some smoky parlor.  _Hah._ As if.

You'd given it a go, of course. Twice, when you were... what, fourteen? Fifteen? You don't even remember. Coming out of the arena, with the bitch that used to work there. You might die any day, you'd reasoned, so why not try fucking first? But sex had turned out to be just as empty as lust and love themselves. The vaunted origin of half the bullshit in the universe, not to mention most of its art, hadn't been half as good a high as cracking skulls or breaking limbs, half as calming as a blade in your hand or food in your stomach. There'd never been a third attempt, and now... the mere _thought_ of their hands on you disgusts you on the best of days, and these days are about as far from the best as you can conceive.

Something in the line of thought brings your mind to a grinding halt, as if whatever support it had been resting on had gone and caved under your weight.

You frown, perplexed, your eyes lost on the still-wet stain your vomiting left on the floor. The idea is ridiculous, yes, but it should not warrant upset. Whores are as they are, certainly, and beacons of disease besides, but nothing to trouble the mind — nothing worse than the Corpse Pit was. And as for this day being about as far from the best as you can—

A strange, distant sort of numbness spreads through your chest and head, and for a moment you think yourself back up the mountain, severed from yourself in ways you cannot articulate. But the moment melts away just like the mountain snow did, and you return to the tavern, still sat on the wet floor, your head and shoulder leaning to the side against the washtub's edge. You look about for the mercenary, and find her sat nearby, in the bedroom's one armchair. Positioned so as to be close, yet face away from the washtub.

"...If I went and knocked up some girl," you mutter through the fading daze, and the woman turns her head back at the sound of your voice. "Would the child even be mine? Can I even— would it _work_ at all?"

The mercenary's brows furrow as her head swivels further back still, but no words come out of her mouth. Her skill for talking your ears off seems inversely proportional to your desire for answers.

"And if it _does_ work," you go on, raising your hands to indicate your chest. "If I fucked someone with this _thing_ that was meant to be empty from the start, will whatever child I father be—"

"Tharaêl," the woman interrupts you, pivoting in her seat to come properly face to face. "Do you _have_ some girl that you want to go and knock up?"

"I — no," you stumble over the word, taken aback by the question.

The mercenary's lips twist into a sarcastic smile.

"I figured. And do you _want_ children?"

" _No_."

The question bears no thought. _Absolutely not_. No children. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. Even discounting your nightmares and the issue of your anger, you would make a dreadful parent. You are not father material.

You almost choke on the sheer irony of that last thought.

"Then _let it go_ ," the mercenary says, her voice more firm than you've ever heard it. "Look, I don't know you enough to know if this is how you normally act when grieving, or if this is years of repressed feelings falling on your brain all at once. But whichever it is, if you keep trying to think through _everything_ at the same time, it's bound to spill over like this. No thinking of the future until you've been at home for a week, alright? Especially not things you _don't_ want to do. They don't matter right now."

But they _do_ matter, some part of you wants to scream at the woman. You would have wanted to— to— damn it all, you don't even know what you would have wanted. To wonder, maybe. To be able to ask yourself the question without the very idea making you feel faint and nauseous.

You would have wanted to have a _choice,_ for once. Only a choice. It would have been enough.

...Yeah. And you would have wanted Letho alive, Sha'Gun decent, and a pretty pony besides. When has what you wanted ever mattered, and why should it begin to now? The world doesn't care, and it never will. Why do you?

 _You know better than this_ , damn it, you think to yourself as you gaze into the bath's still water. To the Black Guardian with what you want; busy yourself with what you _have_. You have a roof over your head, you have someone watching your back, you would have food in your stomach if you hadn't been a moron, and you have a damn bath to take.

You've clawed your way out of the Corpse Pit, fought your way through the arena, with nothing but determination and the willingness to face pain. This is nothing compared. So your flesh is artificial? Boo fucking hoo. At least it's _there_. Every last one of the fleshmaggot sufferers lining the caves would give life and limb to be you. You have two working arms and legs, two lungs and ears and eyes, ten fingers and ten toes and ten unfractured pairs of ribs, a head mostly screwed on straight and only five broken teeth besides. You're doing great, by all standards. You hadn't even _noticed_ the body was fake until today. Why would you break down over this?

You're no longer young, frail, and weak. You no longer cough your lungs out everytime the seasons turn. What does it matter if that's because of the Father, sheer dumb luck, or Malphas and his so-called gods playing yet one more joke on you? You are a grown man, for fuck's sake. You can fight this the same way you fought your way out of everything: by gritting your teeth, steeling yourself, and choosing to _move the fuck on_.

Your mind is sound, and the vessel is functional. That's all that matters in the end.

You're not your vessel, anyway.

"...Yeah," you speak up, meaning the word both for both the woman and yourself. "You're right. It doesn't matter."

The woman's smile becomes a touch more genuine, for all that it still appears nervous around the cheeks and the eyes. You sigh and turn back to the— to _your_ hands. Clenching and unclenching them, watching the way phalanges bend, muscle tightens and relaxes, skin wrinkles over pale blue veins.

It's still the same as yesterday, you remind yourself. Still the same as fourteen years ago. Not Tharaêl Narys of the sewers and the Refuge, perhaps, but still Tharaêl anyway. The Tharaêl of the Corpse Pit, the Dust Pit and the Rhalâta. You can be certain of that much. It's not a comfortable truth, let alone a comforting one, but you are quite simply going to have to fucking deal.

You could handle being thirteen and covered head to toe in blood. You can handle being twenty-four in a synthetic vessel.

"Fuck this," you proclaim to the room, hauling yourself back to your feet, taking care not to slip on the still-soggy floor. You let out a long breath, step over the edge of the washtub, and sit yourself into the water, grasping for the white reflection of what you know must be the soap. You clench it between your knees, leaving it aside a moment more, electing to begin your task with a more familiar gesture: cupping your hands to hold water, and raising them to your head to let it cascade over your scalp. There is no shorn hair to rinse off, but the motion remains soothing.

"If I can do anything to help," the mercenary says, "just ask."

"No, there's no— actually, yes," you change your mind halfway through wishing that the woman would shut up. "There _is_ something you can do. Babble. I'm told you should manage."

"Sure," she snorts, turning back within the armchair to face the wall once more. "What do you want to hear about?"

"Anything," you answer. "Something I don't know. The more of my brain is busy keeping track of what you're saying, the less will be free to ruminate on old bullshit I can't change."

"Like a mantra," she says, and you feel surprised that she even knows the word, until it dawns on you that she spent time in the Temple as well. Diligently listening to the Seers' sermons, at that.

"Exactly like a mantra. So do your thing," you tell her. "Ramble ever on. Distract me."

"I can do that," she agrees, and you practically hear her smile.

You inhale and exhale slowly, in through the nose, out through the mouth. You let your eyes fall closed, shut them tight, concentrate on your breathing. Then you grasp for the soap, wrenching it from between your knees, and set yourself to the newly-unfamiliar task of washing.

Once upon a time, there was a castaway — a black-eyed woman from Nehrim, gone overboard while out at sea.

She'd had very little before, the mercenary says of her, and she'd had nothing afterwards, save for eerie visions and a bout of arcane fever strong enough to fall an Ogre. A passing sellsword rescued the poor woman from bandits, shared his work with her for a time, and then off to Ark she had been, in search of an explanation for her sudden arcane talents. The Order had offered some hints, but the woman had been distrustful, unwilling to tie herself to a creed she disapproved of.

And so she'd left, to remain free. For the woman was not only poor and black-eyed, but quite naïve.

Freedom did not fill her stomach, nor did it buy her Ambrosia when arcane fever came calling. She'd tried to gather some pennies, but Ambrosia was expensive — as were equipment and shelter, when one came with nothing but the clothes on their back. And soon, in a story that you know all too well, the woman had found herself stuck between the rock of the fever and the hard place of the Dust Pit.

She'd rebounded, after it all. Motivation could move mountains, more even than hunger at times. She had been so angry at the Masked Men of the Buried Temple, so disgusted by their request that she go and slaughter the lost, so desperate for a salary not filched from the hands of the poor, that she'd gone back to the Order. She'd thought to garner support there, naïve and foolish as she was. It never could have worked, of course; Enderal was no fair kingdom, and Tealor Arantheal not the wise king stories spoke of. But somehow, the woman's strange visions garnered her their attention — and a few weeks later, by the grace of the Sea, she'd found herself exalted Keeper of the First Sigil, in possession of enough goodwill and funds to buy her own house.

Then the castaway-turned-Keeper had been told the world was at risk, and sent forth on a mission as crucial as there had ever been: one meant to rid Vyn of the evil that had borne the Red Madness.

And she had told the world to wait, to come chase the Father with you.

For _some_ fucking unfathomably stupid reason, you presume.

Reconciling the tale with your own experience proves quite daunting. Not because of lack of detail — the mercenary's prattling more than takes care of that issue — or because of the drain on your mind that the washing proves to be, but because of the insanity of the sequence of events. You walked down into the Dust Pit, found yourself looking on the fights of a competent Sinistrope, decided it was she you would try and hire into your cause. But then, some- _fucking_ -how, you walked out of that very same Pit in the company of a Keeper. A _Phasmalist_ Keeper at that, trailed by an ever-increasing army of dead souls, who could prophetize the future by seeing echoes of the past. Then you'd set out to take down the Father, took down the animate but soulless remains of Letho instead, and discovered yourself to be some sort of — some sort of _construct_. And, last but not least, you found yourself invited to come live in the aforementioned Keeper's own house.

Just like that. Wherever the woman came from, Rhalâim of eight years moving in with Keepers appeared to make sense over there. With not a single question asked, not one guarantee provided. 

All because you had volunteered to go hound Rasha that morning.

You have no idea how to feel about any of it, so you decide not to. You take the woman's story as the sequence of sounds it is, file them as pure information, and store them well away in that part of your mind where you keep the Rhalâs and Tharaêl Narys. Once you are fed and rested and as safe as you can ever be, _then_ you will dig through the story again, try to excavate motes of sense from pile upon pile of chaos. You have enough incomprehensible things on your plate for now.

Regarding the woman herself, you only feel more and more torn. You are not so proud as to think yourself above all assistance; nor are you so daft as to spend too much time hesitating. But the lack of demand for reciprocity unsettles you. No one ever gives so much of anything for nothing. _No one_. That the woman appears to do so means you are blind to the cost — and the last time you were so blind, you woke atop a pile of corpses.

You stare at the backside of the mercenary's head, still reclining against the back of the armchair. You tell yourself that she would not betray you in such a fashion, that the woman has spent too much effort on keeping you alive to wish any harm upon you. But then you remember Sha'Gun standing by your bed and watching, and you remind yourself even _years_ of kindness can hide treason.

By the time you leave the washtub, clean and all too glad to be done, the water is so cold and brown it could have come from the sewers.

You can't help but imagine it to be some sort of metaphor.

It's a matter of mere minutes, albeit quite a few of them, to leave the room as you found it and prepare to leave the Tavern. You get rid of the bathwater by way of bucket and window, while the mercenary makes the bed, sweeps the floor, repacks her bags. You help each other carry washtub and buckets back down the stairs, and, as promised, spend the next hours using it to launder linens, working in companionable silence by the kitchen's fire.

You worry, for a time, that laundry will see you leave late, but the woman explains that lateness is the purpose of the task. She is not eager to see you striding a Myrad's back, she says, so you will be leaving by scrolls — scrolls whose teleport runes lead right into Ark's bustling marketplace. Better to wait for late evening and for the streets to be empty. Less people to see you, less unfamiliar noise to stress you, less chances that the bright sky overhead might trigger your migraine.

You're unsure whether to feel grateful for her concern and foresight, or disgusted all over again by how _fragile_ she thinks you are.

Once all the laundry has been hung and sunlight has left the windows, the mercenary gives your shoulder a tap — for courage, she says — and leads you outside Frostcliff Tavern to pass you a tightly-bound scroll.

"I'll go first and wait for you there," she tells you, giving your shoulder another tap. "Take a moment, if you need to."

You don't need to take a fucking moment to use a fucking scroll, you think, but you simply nod in response. No reason to be abrasive. You've done enough of that these days, and she _is_ attempting to aid you, however clumsy her methods. What manner of fool would you be, if after so much time spent angered by the lack of help, you pushed its belated provider away?

You take a step back as the woman unrolls her own scroll, watches it consume itself in her hands as the magic takes hold, and smiles as her shape scatters into sparks swept by the mountain winds.

"See you at home," her afterimage says, vanishing into light.

You stare at the spot of thin air where the woman was just standing, then let your gaze wander about, taking in the Tavern, the snow, the jagged teeth of the mountains encroaching on the starry sky. You don't imagine you will ever see the place again. The cold and snow may be soothing, but there is nothing for you here. Only remorse, bad memories, and a grave so unbearable to dig you wiped it from your mind.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders.

You shake the image from your head, like the dozens of times you've done so in the past handful of days. You take a few steps through the snow, hearing it crunch under your feet, feeling the wind prickle your eyes. It takes but a minute for you to reach some sort of outcropping, a ledge of snow-dusted rock jutting out high over the valley. The borders of the mountain range stretch out right underneath your feet, turning first into a forest, then the Dark Valley, further south. All of it hidden by the blanket of night and a sea of fog.

The world always seems so fucking big, seen from outside of the caves. An arena so long and wide, and so littered with obstacles, that there is no hope of flushing out every hidden opponent. No ways to avoid being flanked. No solid walls to put one's back to or to barricade between. No certainty of payment and food at the end of each battle. No formal rules of engagement, no announcer to warn of fights. No arbiter to call their end. No end to the fighting at all.

And there you are, empty-handed. No weapon at your hips, no armor on your back. Not even so much as a reason to defend yourself at all.

You throw a glance at the starry sky, the peaks it frames, the woods below. You set your gaze onto the ground, breathe in and out, steel yourself. You clench your hands into fists, straighten your shoulders.

Two hundred feet, or maybe three. Not quite as high, but high enough.

Last chance to jump.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...But what _is_ it that happens to souls, once bodies shatter on the ground?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You close your stinging eyes, let a shaky breath out, and untie your scroll with trembling hands to let the spell do its work.

Once gravity resumes its pull, leaving you stumbling to your knees on cobblestones sprinkled with dust, you feel, for an absurd moment, as if you have just walked right back into the Dust Pit's ring. The darkness, anxious dizziness, the dry dust against your bare hands, all of it feels so familiar — almost achingly so, after so many years spent kneeling and lying on Temple floors. The Dust Pit _had_ been home, in a disturbing way. More than the Temple ever was, and in the light of retrospection, perhaps more than even the Refuge. The one place where you'd been celebrated as a godsend, rather than seen as a burden best cast aside and left to die.

For a ridiculous, irrational second, you find yourself missing Rasha. Her stilted attempts at concern each time you walked into the ring. That beaming grin across her face each time you made it out alive. The look of surprise in her eyes when you first came to claim her tax — and the fear that grew in its place, when you proved just as _concerned_ with her _welfare_ as she'd been with yours.

She never said a thing, of course. Dog ate dog, when coin was at stake. She'd taught you that lesson herself, each time you'd looked up from a kill to find her collecting her bets.

Your hands clench on the cobblestones as you will the memories out.

"Well, welcome home," a voice exclaims, and raising your head brings into sight the mercenary's pale face, smiling in the flickering light of an arcanist's will-o-wisp.

She does not mention the shudders running through your breath and your hands, so you ignore the way light glints in her suddenly wet eyes, and let her weak arms fail to help you up as you haul yourself to your feet. Your gaze wanders, following the wisp as it circles to and fro, illuminating here a stall, there an old tree, elsewhere some shrubs. Garlands of colorful fanions hang over the plaza like cobwebs, stretch from stone wall to chimney to greet an occasion you can't name.

Barely two hundred feet upwards, and it's already so different. Bright garlands in place of clotheslines. Cobblestones rather than cold mud. Moonlight in place of Starling lamps. Twenty years of soul-crushing work, and not a single thing had changed — but two hundred feet up or down, and there the entire fucking world went and shifted on its axis.

You'd expected as much, of course, but seeing low expectations turn into depressing truths never became any easier.

"The house is just a few yards west," the mercenary interrupts your thoughts, as she seems wont to do. She taps your shoulder once again, with much more assurance this time, even pulling on it a little as she begins to walk. "Come on. Let's get you settled in."

You follow her out of the plaza, distractedly, passing between a pair of buildings to access a stall-lined street. High wooden walls frame it much as they would in the Undercity, but here the road is wide and dry, paved just like the plaza had been, and most importantly of all open to the skies overhead. It seems bright even in darkness — even discounting the pallid light cast by the wandering wisp — and infinitely less cluttered than the main cavern's alleyways.

Had it already been like this, when you came up back then to try and plead with those two guards?

...You don't know. You can't remember.

The woman takes a turn left down the cobbled road, her hand still held against your shoulder. Smiling all the while, she points to a narrow house nestled under a tree, framed by an old smelter and a sharpening wheel. Perhaps a weaponsmith's workshop, before the woman had bought it. Useful to keep your own swords sharp, if nothing else.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you remember, vividly, why you are never going to sharpen your swords ever again.

"There we are," the woman says, happiness dripping from her voice. It mixes with your memories of blood on slate and cobblestones like oil with water, leaving you staring at a fractured image — half bloody corridor to the Room of Paintings, half quiet cobbled street at night. You tear your eyes from the sharpening wheel, willing the thought away like you did those of the Dust Pit, just as the mercenary pulls a key out the lock. You hadn't even noticed her bring it out or put it in.

"It's a bit on the small side as houses go," the woman continues, "but it's really easy to find. If you get lost wandering town, just keep an eye out for the smelter, or ask people to direct you to the old market smithy. Everybody knows where it is."

She turns back to you, smiling still, standing atop the three stone steps of the house's threshold.

"Guests first," the woman proclaims, sweeping her arms in a flourish in the direction of the door.

You cast an uncertain gaze at the door, but shrug your doubts aside. Whatever this may be, you have done, and have survived, worse. Yes, it may be a trap, or a deception of some sort, but this is not the Rhalâta or the Refuge. You can change your mind. You can _leave_.

Decision made, you grasp the doorknob, push the gate open, and walk in.

From the moment you step indoors, you find that a lot of things change, some of them rather brutally. Most of all your understanding of what the woman means by 'small'.

Her house being 'small' means that it could hold three families, with room enough to spare for the children of a fourth one. A floor with a wide hearth and covered in carpets. A separate chamber, if one without a door. And shelves, so many shelves, all of them stocked with a moon's worth of grain and various pickled foods. What had seemed from the outside to be a narrow abode is also a _long_ one, and what you'd thought a mere high roof turns out to be harboring an empty mezzanine, wide enough to be its own floor. One with a proper flight of stairs rather than a simple ladder, solid floorboards and airtight walls, and even its own small window.

A second floor which is now _yours_ , you vaguely hear the woman say; to be handled as your own house and furnished at your convenience. You wish she would pause there so you could address your returning doubts, but the words keep coming, commenting on the sight from the window and on the banister. She'd offer you the room downstairs to give you privacy, she says, but cannot afford to do so: nightmares and sleepwalking have plagued her her whole life, and make railings and heights — not to mention staircases — a poor choice of environment for her to spend nights in. You can borrow it and her bed until you buy your own, she adds, but it _must_ be available for her when she is not working.

She says even more afterwards, speaks of where to buy clothes and furniture fit for an Aeterna, but you barely listen, still lost in the concept of having your own floor.

You even take a moment to rest your hand on the banister, purely to reassure yourself you are not hallucinating.

The woman fills you a 'small' purse of gold from a casket by the chimney, to buy your furniture and clothes and other such necessities. You start to count the coins and trade bars as soon as she has her back turned, but find yourself stopping once you reach three hundred with pennies left to spare, a sinking feeling in your gut.

Those are likely not the same coins, but you gather the amount is more than simple coincidence. Four hundred pennies, all in all. You would bet your left hand on it.

The advance you'd paid her so she'd join your crusade.

You can't make yourself ask, and so you say nothing; you merely stand, back to a wall, watching as the woman smiles and prattles about her furniture. She lights a fire with a spell and prepares each of you a 'small' dinner of a bowlful of oats, practically overflowing, topped with a boiled egg and a thick slice of salted lard. She has to _ask_ you to sit down before you can force yourself to, joining her at the, for once, _truly_ small table that the room is centered around. Cutlery in hand, you find yourself wishing the bowl was smaller; used as you are to the fasting that the Rhalâs demands, you're quite certain your stomach will not manage to fit it all in, even as empty as it is.

"...Alright, so I _may_ tend to hoard and overeat a little," the woman mutters when you point it out, sounding somewhere halfway between ashamed and grudging.

You take it 'little' too must be put up for amendment.

Not that you don't understand it — not the quantity, but the _drive_. It took the Rhalâta to wean you off of rationing, of stockpiling all you could find and eating only that which was on the verge of spoiling. Not even the regular meals of the orphanage had managed. You had always kept stashes, hideouts, small corners you would fill to the brim with dried mushrooms and stale bread. A true sewer rat, through and through.

But the amount of stored food is not the part that unsettles you. Nor is it the pile of linens the woman threw over whatever she keeps under the stairs while you'd wandered above, unwilling to trust the reality of 'your' floor until you'd walked on it. You can guess what that must have been — either some manner of religious memorabilia, or whatever tools she plied her Phasmalist's trade with. No, the unsettling part is how _prepared_ everything is. There are two sets of plates and bowls, two sets of silver cutlery. Two mugs, two goblets and two chairs, even as the rickety table barely fits a single person. An upper floor kept clear and clean while the lower drowns in clutter, most of it bags and crates one would expect to find in an attic.

Has the woman been _expecting_ you would need a place to hide? Did she join you on your quest _while anticipating failure?_

But then _why—_

"—I'm glad you didn't jump," the woman suddenly tells you, cutting short both your train of thought and your attempts to dent the mountain of oats in your bowl.

 _I know_ , you think. The woman wants you on your feet, that much is glaringly obvious. She is as daft as sellswords can be while still staying out of the grave, but she does not strike you as likely to trek down mountains for fun, let alone in the company of helpless, half-blind Rhalâim. Clearly, for whatever reason, she thinks she can draw benefit from your continued existence.

"Why do you care," you ask, bristling at the thought. "You won't take the money. I've brought you nothing but corpses. What do you get from this?"

 _What do you get from **me**_ , you studiously leave unsaid. But even unspoken, the words still hang thick in the air.

The woman looks up from her meal to stare at you, brows furrowing in that way you know to mean puzzlement. She sits almost unnaturally still for a moment, then hastily swallows the oats she had still been chewing.

"I'm just glad you're alive is all," she says, wiping her mouth. "I wasn't going to say it, but you keep looking at everything like you're not sure if it's real. I thought you might need to be told. You didn't jump. You're here. I'm glad."

You feel your hands clench the silver fork and knife as they would your swords, and force them to relax, to put the cutlery aside. The woman, oblivious, returns to her own bowl, the question seemingly resolved to her satisfaction.

Why? Fucking _why?_ Where is the _anger_ , the _resentment_ for the mess you dragged her in? The demand that you quickly find a way to provide for yourself? The reminders that _this is just for now_ , that _you must soon be gone?_ Where is the trap? _Is_ there a trap, or is she truly that naïve? And if she is, then how did she carve her way through the arena? Why did _her_ naivety somehow shield her, when _yours_  had left you drenched in blood and murdered Letho twice?

Why is she _so fucking lucky?_ Why are _you?_   _Why_ is Sister Pride to be killed, Brother Hatred to be stepped over, but Brother Wrath to be brought home and fed and given his own floor? Why couldn't it be _Letho_ living to share a house in the sun, instead of the murdering piece of garbage you've let yourself become?

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you can almost imagine the mercenary's by its side, dull black eyes unseeing, sallow skin flecked with red. You stare at the too-full oat bowl, the overfilled shelves and cluttered floor, trying to will consistency into your surroundings, to derive some reason, some meaning, out of the last twenty years.

You find none whatsoever.

"I would have shot you," you state as calmly as you can make yourself. "If that woman hadn't been there, I would have shot _you_. I would have opened that gate with your corpse and wiped the splatter off my face."

The woman's gaze returns to yours, as unreadable as ever.

"Maybe you would have," she answers, putting her spoon down with irritating calm. "You know, everything that can happen will happen, so if you—"

" _I would have shot you, damn it,_ " you snap at her, willing her to make sense.

Your voice echoes, vague and blurry, bouncing under the high roof and the empty upper floor. You instinctively cringe back at its sound. Habit. _Useless_ habit, now. Sound does not carry as far up here as it does in the tunnels, does not risk calling the attention of patrolling Rhalâim. Does not risk drawing the ire of the First Seer upon you.

The woman only tilts her head, crosses her arms on the table.

"You think I don't already think about this all day long? Yes, Tharaêl," she says, looking you in the eye, her expression serious yet on the verge of pitying. "You would have shot me, and on some wave of the Sea, _you did_. I know it, because I _saw_ it. In perfect colorful detail. Do you know what else I saw? That on some other wave, I defended myself, and _you_ fed the temple instead. And then on yet another wave, we struck each other at the same time, and died bleeding out on the floor while feeling extremely stupid. I presume the Father found it very funny."

You open your mouth to retort, but she forestalls you, raising a hand, refusing to let you interrupt.

"But here," the woman continues, "on the one and only wave of the Sea that matters, you _didn't_ shoot me. I _didn't_ burn you. We walked our way down Northwind Peak carrying each other's baggage. We shared a room, we shared a tent, we shared a bed, we shared _a pile of coffins_ of all things, and we even shared a bath. Since in spite of it all we both seem to still be alive and in each other's company, I think we may as well admit we make a pretty decent team, and let the Sea of Eventualities handle the shoulds and woulds."

...A team.

Has the imbecile even been _listening_ to you?

"Alright," you pretend to concede, unwilling to argue the point with a wall any further. "Let's say we're a team. What now?"

"Blazes, Tharaêl," she chortles, that moronic smile returning to her lips. "Which part of 'don't think through it all at once' is it that you don't understand?"

" _What now_ ," you yell at the infuriating mercenary, forcing yourself past your urge to cringe at the increased volume — and you can almost feel satisfaction flow through your veins as the woman's smile fades and she backs into her chair. "What's the plan, huh? What does a reformed Rhalâim _do_ in the Upper City, exactly? I can cut throats and break fingers, but I don't figure that's what Sunchildren look for in their employees. What happens when no righteous man will hire some Pathless Aeterna with scars all over his face? Should I just sit pretty like some prized hound on your oh-so-fancy carpets, while you dump some gruel in my bowl and pat my shoulder every once in a while? What about when you go and get yourself killed playing hero for the Order? What happens _then?_ "

The woman stares at you a while, hands nervously grasping at her elbows. Taken aback by your anger, clearly, in a way she hadn't seemed to be before.

Good. Maybe reality is finally beginning to sink into her.

"...Thanks for the vote of confidence," she quips in a deadpan voice, and you find your hands clenching all over again, nails biting into flesh, pulse echoing through your fingers. "Look, we'll figure that out when I come back. First, I have to check in with Grandmaster Arantheal as soon as I can, and—"

"You're a fucking sellsword of three moons out to fight transcendent beings," you interject, quite done with the woman's nonsense. "You think I need _coddling?!_  Alright. Fine. _Fuck you_ ," you snarl to punctuate the idea, "but _fine_. But do me the fucking _courtesy_ of not making shows of promising grand tomorrows when you don't even know if you'll survive today."

"What? No," the woman practically exclaims. "Tharaêl, no, you're taking this the wrong way, I didn't mean—"

" _None of this_ is mine," you continue, undaunted by what would no doubt be yet another attempt to drown you in false reassurances. "Not the food, not the house, none of it. I can't count on any of it. Stop pretending I can. Just— just  _stop_."

"Tharaêl—"

"—I said _fucking **stop**!_"

She does.

...You didn't quite expect that. You thought she would — well, do what she always does. Poke and prod. Insist on ramming herself through doors, barging into corners of your mind where she hasn't been invited. But she merely stays sat, hands resting atop each other on the very edge of the table.

"...Sorry," she mumbles, looking as downcast as you've ever seen her. "You're right."

You practically deflate as she says so, and so does your anger, letting your hands hang limp at last.

The woman sighs, seemingly as drained as you are. She looks to her left, and you follow her gaze — past the chimney and into the shelves, through the rows of fruit and herbs pickled in small glass jars. She stares at them, at the much-too-many baskets of potatoes, the pot of aging vegetables and the sacks of wheat and oats.

Her head slowly comes to hang, and you almost feel guilty.

"Look, I don't have the slightest clue how to manage any of this either," the woman finally admits, and you can hear your breath come more easily as she does, feel some of the ever-building tension leave your shoulders. "I'm making shit up as I go along. I know it. You know it. And _I know_ you know it. I just — I want this to go _right,_ so I'm trying my best, and—"

"—It makes you sound either delusional or blind as a cave fish," you interrupt her half-apology half-explanation. "You want to help me. I understand that. I _appreciate_ that," you emphasize, lest you come to sound like an ingrate. "But I need to know where this field's obstacles are to maneuver around them, and I can't do that if you keep blindfolding me with pretty words."

The woman lifts her head back up to look straight into your eyes, and sighs a second time, nodding.

"This next part is all true," she says, looking much more reliable with that fake smile wiped off of her face. "You're not pressed for time. Not that much. It's like you said: there's enough food in here for weeks. And you have the purse; you can save some and find some place to hide it, if you want. Take some of both, make them last, and you can find some inn room or shack and hunker down for a while. That'll see you through if... if you can't trust me."

By the name of the Sun, finally. _Finally_ , the girl is beginning to talk sense.

Would that it didn't take yelling at her to make her speak in plain Inâl.

"Yeah," you answer her as you ponder her words. "I can probably do that, but only once I know the place enough. You don't _improvise_ stashes of food and money. Unless you want them to be filched by the nearest rat or lowlife."

"I don't figure you'll accept 'open an account at the bank' as good advice?"

Your brow reflexively creases as the woman smiles, but the quirk of her lips is wry and sarcastic this time. Sincere.

A joke.

"No," you say through your own small, faint shadow of a grin. "I won't."

"Well then," she continues, lying back into her seat once more. "If you're determined not to trust local establishments, a day or two should suffice for you to find some sort of backup plan. Shave, buy some clothes and a hat, and wander a little to get the lay of the land. Just... ask people if they have anything they need done for a few pennies, enough to reliably pay for a room at an inn. Carts to load or unload, floors to clean, anything. Be patient, be polite and mindful of people's faith, and you'll find some odd jobs here and there. I did."

It would be a start, part of your mind concedes. A foundation to build on.

The rest of your mind, however, is not so easy to persuade. Working out and about in Ark, provided you even manage to find some work in the first place, means being in sight of the guard. Unable to retaliate, be it against word or blade, without bringing yourself to their attention. No weapon at your hips, no armor on your back, no weapons in your hands but discipline and temperance.

You sigh, eyes lost into the thick oat sludge that still sits in your bowl. 

"I can't convince you I mean any of what I say with words, can I."     

You blink at the sound of the woman's voice, and let your gaze return to her. She remains sat on the other end of the small table, head tilted to the side, a pensive frown on her face.

"No," you agree. "You can't."

It doesn't particularly please you to admit it. For all that you can never attest to her true motives, the woman has, at the very least, acted loyal so far, if in sometimes perplexing ways. You don't want to compromise it any more than you did in Frostcliff Tavern or the Temple. Not while you have so little else to rely on, so few options to look into.

Not with the cliff so close and the climb so daunting.

"Alright," she answers, nodding to herself. "So I have an idea. How about this." She straightens in her seat, looking into your eyes. "Pick yourself a new name, and I can get you added to the title deed of the house."

The muscles of your back tense all over again as the enormity of the offer sinks in. No one ever gives so much of anything for nothing. No one. Not Sha'Gun, not the apothecaries, and certainly not some random mercenary from the Dust Pit.

You open your mouth to argue, to try and find the secret flaw, the hidden cost of the proposal. 

"Why do you want to take my name," is what comes out instead.

You freeze at the sound of your voice, stunned by the sudden gap between your thoughts and words. How...?

"I _don't_ want to," the woman replies to the question you hadn't meant to ask, forcing you to focus on her rather than on your racing mind. "But you're the only Tharaêl I've so much as heard of in my whole life. I've been dealing with the idiots in charge here for a while, and if there is one thing I know for sure about this city, it's that shady fuckers flock together. The Rhalâta deals in loans and in dirty money," she says, raising her left fist. "The folks at the bank, where you'd have to fill the ledgers, deal in investing and laundering," she continues, raising the other. "Tell me the twain never meet in back alleys and cushy rooms," she concludes, clapping both hands together in front of her face, "and I have sunlit fields in Thalgard to sell you. And with you saying the First Seer has ears everywhere..."

She shrugs.

It makes sense. You don't like it, but it makes sense. You've always been free with your deadname, convinced as you were it would never matter again. No doubt someone somewhere, some informant or spy, has heard of Tharaêl Narys, Voice of the Father.

"It's the middle of the night," you say. A weak retort, perhaps, but all you can manage, just as lost in the concept of having property to your name as you had been in that of owning an entire floor.

"And I'm a Keeper of the First Sigil, the Prophet of the Order," the woman shrugs. "What use is having rank, if I can't pull it on Samael Silren? Pick a name, any name, and I can promise you _this_. I can walk out this door and bring this house back to you, ink on paper and seal of the bank at the bottom. Right now."

You want to feel angry, somehow. To rage and rant at her as you had only mere moments ago. But the offer is more than fair, and well-trod ground besides. It isn't as if you've truly worn the name since the orphanage; only a litany of Dust Pit titles and nicknames, themselves soon discarded in favor of becoming Brother Wrath. You haven't been Tharaêl Narys in over a dozen winters. Haven't ever been him at all, really. Just a construct of the Father's, borrowing his name and memories.

You want to feel angry, but all you feel is numb.

"Letho," you murmur to the woman, hoping you will not have to explain your answer.

Not that you could, if she asked you to. There is no logic to the choice. Only the need to pull the name out of the void gnawing at you. To snatch it away from the Undercity and the Father and let it be spoken under the sun where it belongs. So what if you are not Tharaêl? Letho still existed, still deserved remembrance. And with the true Tharaêl gone, with Letho's body lost to the Father and to Wrath both, who will honor him, if not you?

You expect the woman to question, to argue, to call the choice a bad idea. But all she does is rise from the table and walk into her room without a single word. You hear her pull and rummage in her drawers for a while, even leaving something to clatter loudly on the floor; then she returns, inkwell, quill, and parchments in hand, as if nothing was amiss.

Perhaps she'd expected this choice just as much as your choice to pull back from the cliff.

"Letho it is," she says as she puts down the inkwell and quill by your hand. She unrolls the two parchments side by side on the table, and points to their bottoms, where what you guess to be her own signature lies. "Can you write 'read, agreed, and accepted' and sign these for me?"

You attempt to read the scrolls, but find the task impossible. The words are but lines of nonsense, letters refusing to coalesce into a coherent whole. Migraine? No, your head does not hurt. That...  _thing_ the Father called strangeness, perhaps? Wasn't it supposed to affect _faces_ , not words?

Not that the words matter at all. You have no leverage with which to argue the terms of the contract.

No motivation to do so, either.

You sigh and simply sign the damn things, improvising some swirling curls to adorn Letho's name, then hold the parchments out for the woman to take. She does so with a slight frown, but does not comment, praise the Sun.

"Well, there it goes," she says, eyeing your cramped, uneven script. "These should be enough, as long as I'm the person bringing it to them." She shakes the parchments a little, takes a few seconds to blow the ink dry, then carefully rolls them back upon themselves. "We can go there together to discuss specifics when I'm ba— _if_ I'm back. Or you can sort them out with Silren by yourself. Preferably soon. The bank is on the marketplace. Right at the opposite end of the central plaza, coming from here."

You understand the words. Intellectually, at least. You could define each and every last one of them, if asked. And yet somehow, to a degree, none of them register. As if the void had seeped out of you to sap them of their meaning, leaving only husks in its wake.

You look at the woman, for lack of better things to do, and the two of you find yourselves staring at each other, her standing, you sitting. Neither of you appearing to know how to proceed from this point.

A minute passes.

A second.

"Um," the woman eventually says, seemingly first to recover from your mutual lapse of consciousness. "Is there anything that would help right now?" 

...Good question. You don't know. Probably nothing. What possibly _could_ help, short of erasing all that happened since your tenth winter?

"Just some quiet," you try to answer the woman, more out of rote than out of any actual desire. " _A lot_ of quiet. For quite some time."

She looks at you again, still frowning, and her mouth opens and closes in silence a few times before she shakes her head and sighs.

"Alright," she answers you. "Fine by me. The spare key is on a nail above the front window. If you need anything, _anything at all_ , you can ask Mimi, right out the door. She's there every morning, brown hair, blue dress, you can't miss her. I'll let her know my outlander Aeterna friend could use some help with directions. She'll take a message to me in the Temple if you need. You'll have to pay, but she's reliable."

You let the words run through your head, wringing what meaning you can out of them. Keys above window. Ask the woman in blue. Outlander friend. Why not. You suppose it could make a good cover story. You certainly feel out of place enough to be an outlander, and it would serve to excuse inevitable cultural gaps. 

It could work. It _would_ work. It would provide a few tangible ways of handling your situation.

And you don't care.

Weren't you upset about this only moments ago?

You try to roll the minutes back, to retrieve the annoyance from out of your sudden numbness, or even simply remember why you had been upset at all. What words or poor turn of phrase could have possibly triggered it. 

Nothing registers.

You turn your head to the mercenary, thinking to ask her, only to find that she has retreated back into the room. You can glimpse her, or at least her back, clad in the white and reds of the Order and the Guard. Changing to make her words to the Bank carry more weight, you presume.

Funny, when you think about it. Only three moons ago you would have laughed at the thought of ever associating with a Keeper. And now here you are, dining — and presumably soon _living_  — in the abode of one you've known for but a scant few weeks, most of them spent fully unaware of the woman's rank.

"Tharaêl?"

You blink out of your thoughts to find the woman standing next to you again, looking like any other Guard if not for her black eyes and her diminutive stature. A Starling parent in her ancestry, perhaps. She raises a hand towards your arm, then seems to think better of it and lets it fall back down, letting her hands clench together over her stomach instead.

"I'm not Yesha Sha'Gun," the mercenary says, and the words clatter in the void that has been settling over you like a chime thrown into a well. "I have no idea what else I will or will not do, but I'm not going to sell you out. Not to the Rhalâta, not to the Order, not to _anyone_. I'm going to do my best to do right by you. Please trust in that, if nothing else."

She looks at you, steadily, clearly expecting some form of response. But what can you even _say_ to that? _'I know'_? You don't. _'I believe you'_? You don't even know if the woman believes _herself_.

"I'm sure Sha'Gun thought the same thing," you answer her, numbness making a mild rebuke of what you would ordinarily voice as violent retort.

The woman's eyes lower, leaving yours to settle somewhere around your clavicle. She nods, quiet, almost somber, and leaves the tableside, grabbing her pack from a spare chair on her way to the door. She opens it and slips outside without any more words, locking the door behind her with two turns of her key in the lock.

You can hear the sound of her boots down the three steps of the threshold, faint echoes in the night, taking your name with them.

You'd only just gotten it back.

A weary sigh escapes your lips, and you push your still half-full bowl aside to lay your arms on the table, then lay your head on top of them. Finally, some calm. Some time to rest, to think without a pair of eyes hovering over your shoulder. The woman feels like nothing so much as a new Seer at times. A kinder one, perhaps, but just as omnipresent in her oversight and her disapproval.

Pushing thoughts of the woman to the side much like you did your bowl, you allow the void and its numbness to blanket you in blissful silence.

You don't know how long you've sat still, head buried in your arms, by the time the sound of paper brushing on wood catches your attention. You jerk back reflexively, head swishing to the side to locate the origin of the sound — and you find it, innocently laying on the floorboards. A letter, slipped under the door.

You stare at it like you would at a dog, half upset by its noise, half pondering its provenance. Still, in time, you manage to push yourself to rise, and cross the room at a brisk pace to pick the letter from the floor. A simple bit of clear parchment, wrapped around other ones — a small note from the bank, demanding a meeting 'within the week', and one of the two deeds the woman has asked you to sign. Now amended with a few lines specifying your ownership of 'the attic', a new seal, and what you guess to be Samael Silren's signature.

Well, there it is. You now own an entire floor.

Just like that. Because.

You keep staring at the house deed as you return to the table, uncertain how to feel about the parchment's existence. You are about to sit back down, hopefully to resume basking in the silence for quite some time, when you notice that the wrapping of the deed and note is not as clear as you had thought it to be — two lines adorn its other side, ink slightly smudged by your fingers.

 _Keep these safe,_ says the first one, written in what you guess to be the mercenary woman's hand.

 _Please still be home when I come back,_ says the second, more haphazard.

Something in that second line settles uneasily in your gut, tearing a hole there not even the void had managed to open. You try to will it closed, but only find its breadth spreading, leaking into your chest, your arms, the tips of your fingers. You can feel your anger bubble back up from the void at long last, and you kick at the chair, frustrated beyond words.

The force sends it skidding right into the table, and the rickety mess of course picks this time to tilt over, taking its contents with it in its fall. You stand and watch, silent, as the pots and pan spill over, glass jars and earthenware crashing into shards all across the floor. The sludge of the leftover oats splatters the carpet and floorboards, leaving wet, greasy stains in its wake.

 _Congratulations, Tharaêl,_ you tell yourself, instinctively sickened by the sight of the wasted food. _Five minutes into your tenance, and you've already wrecked the house._

What a fine piece of work you are. Letho would be so proud.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you press the heels of your hands against your eyes, rubbing as strongly as you can. The memory fades back, but the feelings remain — rage and regret in equal measure, wrath and shame and longing and wishing that for once, just fucking _once,_  the arena would let you _go_.

Well. What did the woman expect? You warned her. This is what you do. You break things for stupid reasons, then you regret it afterwards. And what did _you_ expect, anyway? You knew you should have jumped. Then neither of you would be dealing with any of this.

You sit down on your haunches, observing the result of your latest outburst. Glass liberally dusts the oats and the lard once held by the pots, making them inedible even if you scooped them up. The pan is unsurprisingly unharmed, and one of the pots seems to have survived the fall intact, but the bowls are thoroughly shattered, as are all three of the jars. At least they were empty, you comfort yourself as you think of the pickled meat lining the shelves. Wasting the lard is bad enough.

Letting out a long, tired sigh, you set yourself to the slow task of picking up your own damn mess, fragment after fragment, one small piece at a time.

There's no saving the broken things, but you can probably wash the stains out of the carpet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titled after "Submerge" by Movements.
> 
> Song and lyrics [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_phkkSVFVQ) and on the fic's Tumblr mirror.


End file.
